Someone

TWO

Once, I woke to find that a black wheel, spoked with flashing silver, had settled behind my left eye. Tom had gotten up sometime before. He was quietly bustling as he did these dark winter mornings of our late middle age—passing shadowy back and forth across the foot of the bed, silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. He was humming, as always, occasionally breaking into whispered song, his voice deep in his throat. “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” He was in undershirt and boxer shorts, and the room was filled with the scent of his soap and his shaving cream.

Until I reached for my glasses, all of this was soft-edged and indistinct. All but the solid black image that had imposed itself over my vision. With my head still on the pillow, I put a cupped palm over my right eye and then the left. It was in the left. “Something’s wrong,” I said, sitting up slowly. “There’s something in my eye.”

He was abruptly silent. He crossed to my side of the bed, sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress. He placed a crooked finger under my chin to lift my face as he leaned toward me. I looked up to the shadowed ceiling so I would not blink. I could smell the toothpaste on his breath, the soap on his fleshy shoulders, the aftershave on his warm hand.

“I can’t tell,” he said. I told him to turn on the lamp.

He leaned toward the bedside table, the mattress beneath me shifting with his weight. He turned back. Now the light cast across the ceiling was a spill of soft gold. He lifted my chin once again, gently, even coyly, the prelude to a kiss, and peered again at my eyes. “I can’t see anything unusual,” he said.

It was my own fear, as well as my surprise at the shimmer of desire that touched the small of my back when he put his warm hand to my face, that made me speak to him so impatiently. “Give me my glasses.”

He reached for them—I could have done this myself—and I slipped them on. I cupped my hand over my left eye, and the room settled into its distinct edges. I looked at his face, which was clear again. I could see the blush of irritation from his razor, a pinprick of blood on his cheek. Even then he was smooth-skinned, although there were laugh lines, drawn as if with a pencil, in the corners of his eyes. His lips were thin and serious. His chin grown slack. It seemed a long time since I had looked at him this closely. I put my hand on my right eye and the black wheel was imposed over everything.

“Something’s wrong,” I said again. I put my hand out, as if to brush whatever it was away. “There’s a black thing in my left eye.” I described a circle in the air before me and then tried to pluck at it again. I was aware of how foolish I must look—like a madwoman in my thin nightgown, with my hair sleep-skewed, grabbing at nothing. “There’s flashing,” I said. “Like spokes turning. I can’t blink it away.”

I covered the left eye once more and then looked at him. I knew it was not unusual for husbands to become annoyed with sick wives. The neighborhood was filled with such tales. But Tom had tucked his chin into his throat and the lines around his eyes were suddenly deeper. There was more concern than impatience in his face, and no impatience at all in his voice. “Better call the doctor,” he said.

I heard him humming again in the kitchen as he waited for the doctor’s service to pick up, the song an insistence that he was perfectly calm, that nothing much had changed in the last few minutes, nothing disruptive or insurmountable. I heard him explaining it all to Gabe when he came downstairs for breakfast: Marie seems to have damaged her left eye, he said. Sometime in the night.

By late afternoon I was wearing a pirate patch and Tom was leading me to the admitting office of a hospital in Manhattan. Of course, churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were. But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together. The births of our four children, my mother’s death, the kids’ tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe’s breakdown, and now this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn’t it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?

But Tom had his hand on my elbow now, and in the other he carried the kit bag that my ophthalmologist had told me to pack but that the admitting nurse contended I wouldn’t need. Tom finagled a private room and, once I was settled in, a dinner tray for himself, although I was only to sip water. There was the strange domesticity of the evening, the smell of food, the sound of the evening news on TV, the scrape of cutlery, and our back-and-forth conversation about ordinary things while the hospital went about its noisy business of paging doctors and delivering medicines, and nurses came in now and again to offer this pre-op information or that.

In the morning—a brown city dawn at the room’s narrow, deep-set window—Tom was there again, but he had only touched my hand and kissed my scalp by way of greeting before they came to wheel me down to surgery. They took me in the same bed I’d slept in, so that when they maneuvered it out the door and swung it around to head toward the elevator, I looked over my shoulder and waved goodbye to him as if I were a woman on a passing train. He stood alone in the now strangely empty room, not a bit of concern in his bright smile or his jaunty wave, but unabashed fear and sorrow in his eyes and across his high forehead.

What followed was ten days of blindness. They had bandaged both my eyes so that the healthy one would not go darting about, dragging along, all inadvertently, the one that had been repaired. It seemed a bit much, I told the doctor, but he assured me it was for the best—a little inconvenience now for a better outcome later. I recognized the wheedling phrase from my first labor, when, at the height of the pain, the ether was withheld. A little patience now, the eye surgeon said—after he had been reduced by my blindness to a pair of dry fingertips and the odor of whatever he had on his breath, coffee or bacon in the morning, ketchup or onion if he came in after lunch—for a well-healed eye in the future.

“My eyes,” I told him, the blindness making me raise my chin as I spoke, a bold piece, “have never been well-heeled.” But he was some kind of Eastern European and didn’t get the play on words, only touched his puffy fingertips to my chin. “Patience,” he said.

I said, “A patient patient,” and still he didn’t respond, although somewhere in the room Tom and Gabe were laughing. Tom said, “My wife, Doctor, will always have the last word.”

Somewhere in the room during those long days of bandaged darkness, my children sat, talking mostly to one another, mostly about where they had managed to park their cars and what time they had left home, what time they should head out again to avoid the traffic: tunnel or bridge, the Southern State or the L.I.E. I heard the bustle of their winter clothes, zip and unzip, buckle and snap. There was the jingle of car keys and the odor of exhaust. I listened to their familiar voices with a vague indifference. Rattle and clink. It was my first sense of their lives going on without me.

When I woke I was sitting up in the bed. I had no way to tell the hour. I listened, neither the clatter of meal trays nor the smell of the outdoors on visitors’ clothes. Perhaps the quiet of a shift change, or the still of late night or of very early morning. The sound of city traffic was hushed and sporadic enough to mean it was either late night or very early morning. The pillows were propped behind me, and my hands lay limply at my sides, outside the thermal blanket whose texture I had begun to know as a sighted person might know a familiar face. I searched for my voice, and even the tentative way I sought it reminded me of how a blind person might scuttle her hands toward something that had fallen just out of reach.

“Hello,” I said finally, weakly enough, feeling foolish to be speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night, or a good hour or two before they brought in breakfast, but adding, nevertheless, “Is anyone here?” Giving in to foolishness in order to avoid being overtaken by fear.

I had a terrible, lonely image of myself in the white bed, my nose in the air, the gauze wrapped around my eyes. I pictured the lightless hospital room, but since it had been so long since I’d seen this particular one—and had seen it only briefly, even so—I could not be sure if the details were real or imagined, the actual place or a compilation of all the hospital rooms I had ever been in. I imagined the building around me, the dull pulse of all the sleeping bodies it contained, room after room, floor upon floor, above and below. Something of Calvary Cemetery, of Gate of Heaven, about the rows of pale beds and all those strangers with their own troublesome eyes and ears unconscious now, heads thrown back, mouths open, breathing softly into this gray light between night and day.

I heard the sound of movement, some distance from the bed, it seemed—a breath and feather sound of soft movement from an unseen part of the unseen room.

“Me,” a voice said hoarsely. And then, after a shy clearing of the throat, “I’m here.”

I hesitated. I’ll admit I was afraid. I felt my useless eyes moving behind the gauze. “Who is?” I said. The days of blindness had made my voice impatient and wary.

I knew him, of course, by his laughter. “Tom,” he said. “Who else?”

Because Walter Hartnett had said, “You don’t want to go into New York City”—and hadn’t poor Pegeen Chehab called it a filthy place?—I studied the want ads in the paper every morning while my mother and Gabe got ready for work and then told them, “Nothing for me,” in the evening when they returned.

I might still be in my pajamas or a housecoat. I would be sleepy and bored, and the apartment would smell of nail polish or bath salts or the cigarettes I had taken up in my last year at Manual, hoping to look glamorous.

“There was nothing for me,” I would tell them.

My mother lifted the paper, which was always disheveled and thoroughly read, or fetched it from the garbage if I had remembered to throw it away. “Here.” She pointed to a notice for typists or switchboard operators. “And here,” holding the paper under my nose. “What about this?”

I would glance down disdainfully. “Yes, but that’s midtown.” Or, pretending to be surprised at my mother’s foolishness, “But that’s Wall Street. I’m not going there.”

Gabe was working for IT&T on Park Avenue. He would emerge from the kitchen with his single after-work drink in his hand, his collar unbuttoned beneath the loosened tie. “There will be no getting her out of Brooklyn,” he would say. Or, “She’s just a small-town Brooklyn girl.” Tempering my mother’s anger with a wink and a nod and a gentle hand to her shoulder, which was really just a plea for peace.

All that Gabe desired in those days, he said, was the peace and quiet in which a fellow might read.

Twice since I’d graduated he’d set up an interview for me in the typing pool at his office, and twice I refused to go. Even my mother, who had found work as a seamstress at Best and Company, had given up pestering me about a sales job there. Every evening that summer and fall we faced one another in the small living room as it caught the fading light. “Our Marie,” Gabe would pronounce, his collar open and the day’s one drink in his hand, “will not leave this sceptered isle, Momma, this Brooklyn,” charming my mother into some kind of peace, the peace in which a fellow might read. “You’d better face the fact.”

Although when the time came, when the neighborhood as we had known it had crumbled and was no more, it was Gabe who would not leave.

In late September, I came in from Mass with my mother and Gabe and lifted the Sunday paper from the couch. As the two of them put breakfast together in the kitchen, I sat at the dining-room table with it—as was my routine—and turned the pages idly enough until one of them, as I lifted it, buckled like lace. A long column had been neatly removed. I stared, puzzled for a moment. What had been cut out was part of an ad for women’s shoes and just the corner of a story continued from page 1, something about the British Prime Minister, a great hero of Gabe’s in those days. I looked underneath, to the facing page, and saw that it was the first of the society pages, weddings. And that it was from this page that the long column had been carefully excised. I closed the paper when Gabe came in with the tea and a plate of toast and asked me casually, “Anything new in the world?”

I might have said, like Joan Blondell (I had been to the movies with Gerty just the night before), What kind of fool do you take me for? except for the quick and wary way Gabe’s eyes went to the paper spread out on the table.

“Nothing interesting,” I said vaguely.

Of course, it was Gabe who had cut out the column, Walter’s wedding announcement. My mother did not read the newspaper—complained mightily about how much time her children devoted to it, in fact—but Gabe read it thoroughly in the early hours of every morning, especially with all that was going on in Europe. He must have gotten up from the couch while my mother and I were still asleep, gone into the kitchen for the shears. I might have said to him now, Hollywood-style, Do you take me for a fool? Did you think I wouldn’t put two and two together?

I knew Walter’s wedding had taken place, of course. I knew people from the neighborhood who had been invited. I had watched from my bedroom window, in fact, as Bill Corrigan and his mother got into a cab, his mother dressed for church on a Saturday morning.

But something about Gabe’s gesture, its generosity and its futility, made me simply fold the paper up and toss it to another chair.

“I can’t be bothered reading it all,” I said. “It’s so dull.”

Gabe nodded, sheepish perhaps. But pleased.

I watched him in his rolled shirtsleeves as he took the plates and the silverware from the sideboard. He, too, had gone to the movies last night with the girl he was seeing from his office. Agnes. He had come in after my mother and I were already in bed. I had followed his silhouette as he passed through our room to get to his own, heard the fall of his shoes and the faint rattle of his belt buckle as he undressed. I knew without hearing that he knelt to pray before climbing into bed. I listened for a while until I heard his steady breathing, his reluctant sleep. When I rolled over again, I saw in the street-lit darkness that my mother was awake, listening as well.

I got up from the table to help him. As if his ploy had actually succeeded, he was suddenly lighthearted. He knocked me with his hip as I reached across him with a cup and saucer, playful and brotherly, the Sunday scent of aftershave and starch still about him. He began telling me about the news, about Czechoslovakia and Germany, and the possibility of war. I nodded, barely listening. Had I seen the photo of the flawless bride, I would have studied it, of course. I would have read, suffering all the while, the details of her attendants and her dress, her fancy schools. My eyes would have lingered on the name: Walter Hartnett, son of Elizabeth Harnett and the late, mustachioed father.

Gabe had thought to spare me that. He had thought he could.

My mother carried in the platter of fried eggs and bacon. My brother was waxing eloquent now, standing at his end of the table while my mother filled the plates. The two of us looking up at him from our chairs. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas—politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman’s simple heartache.

When he finally sat down and bit into his toast, I raised my teacup and said, “Amadan.” My mother clucked her tongue disapprovingly. Gabe laughed. Of course, he thought I meant his politics. And commended me later for my insight.

Now, an evening in late October, my mother walked into the kitchen still wearing her hat and her gloves. I was peeling potatoes at the sink. At summer’s close, my mother had declared that if I wasn’t going to find myself a job, I was, at least, going to be responsible for getting dinner started for the members of the household who already had one—although with my ineptitude in the kitchen so well established by then, putting the potatoes on to boil or setting out the meat and sprinkling it with salt was the extent of the tasks my mother dared to assign me.

“Fagin,” my mother announced, still in her hat and her gloves and with her pocketbook still on her arm, “needs a girl. You have an interview with him at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

I reached to turn off the water that was running in the sink. I looked at her from over my shoulder. “The undertaker?” I said.

My mother nodded, smiling: the cat that swallowed the canary. “I ran into him on the way home. His girl, that lovely Betty, is expecting. She’ll be leaving him as soon as he hires someone new. Wear your good suit. If he likes you, you’ll have a nice, steady position, right here in Brooklyn. Just what you wanted.” She began to take off her gloves, smiling: a job well done. “Sit yourself down, dear,” she said generously, all past strife forgiven now that she had won. “I’ll just go change and finish up dinner,” which was the regular routine but which, tonight, my mother said as if it were yet another benefit bestowed. She turned and left the kitchen, humming. Humming.

The potatoes I had peeled were piled on the drain board beside the sink, surrounded by a little puddle of their dirty rinse water. The flesh of them, newly exposed, was sickly white and still gave off an odor of dampness and cold earth. With their blind eyes and mute yellow faces, they resembled nothing more than what they were: pale, underground creatures bred without light—sustenance.

Was it any wonder I hated to cook?

“I don’t want to work for Fagin,” I said, but weakly. And knew my mother was pretending not to hear.

The funeral parlor was in a brownstone eight blocks away. Mr. Fagin, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a small neat head, met me at the door, just letting himself in, having gone out to fetch the paper. The two of us climbed the stairs together to his office on the second floor. The parlor floor, he explained as we climbed, was for wakes, the basement was where he and his assistants prepared the bodies, and the second floor was for business. He and his mother lived on the third.

He opened the office door and put out his arm to convey wordlessly that I should go first, and it was this gesture that made me suddenly recall him from the days of my father’s funeral, when he had been to me only a broad dark figure silently but effectively directing us: to the coffin or to the car or into the pew at church, and then in and out of the crowded cemetery. I had no recollection of his face from those terrible days, only his benevolent shadow.

And yet his face was, I thought now, sitting across from him, surprisingly pleasant. There were fleshy circles under his eyes, but his cheeks were smooth and rosy and he had a small but easy smile. He had been a redhead once. Although he was now mostly gray, there was the sense of sunny boyishness in his wavy hair, patted down with water. He looked more like a policeman or an athletic priest than an undertaker. The room he used for his office was not large, but it contained a good many things: the big dark desk, two velvet chairs before it, bookcases and a credenza, and a small table with a crystal decanter of sherry, a bottle of whiskey, and a bottle of gin. He sat with his back to the one window in the room, and it showed a lush tree, full of leaves turning yellow and gold. There were black binders on the bookcases, and piles of prayer books, a Bible and a dictionary, and the collected works of Charles Dickens bound in rich leather.

Later he would tell me that it was his intention to reclaim the name of Fagin from the bastard—a writer, he said, whom he loved and admired and despised in what he believed was the very way of brothers.

There was also on one of the shelves, among the books, the bodiless head of a china baby doll, curly-haired and beautiful, with a rosebud smile and what might have been human lashes on the edges of its closed eyes. A model, he would also tell me later, for the face of a child in restful sleep. It was the only thing about the place that made me uncomfortable.

He asked politely after my mother and my brother, and tried to remember precisely, in the Brooklyn way, the street and cross streets where our apartment was. He said, “Next door to the Chehabs, who have the bakery?” And I said yes.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Poor Pegeen,” he said, and pursed his lips to convey, professionally, both his regret for their loss and his complete resignation to what could not be undone. “There was a great beauty.”

I liked him well enough by then to believe he said this as a gallantry, not an error of memory.

“Nothing worse for a mother than to bury her child,” he said. “The worst days of my life are when we have to bury some mother’s child.”

His accent was all Brooklyn—nuttin, motha—but there was also some vestige of the brogue he might have had growing up—poorr Pegeen—that reminded me of my father.

The job was simple enough, as he explained it. In his twenty years of business, he had always had, he said, a young woman on the payroll. She would have nothing to do with the preparation of the bodies, of course. (I said, “Thank goodness,” surprising myself that I spoke out loud. Fagin laughed.) I was only to serve as a kind of hostess, greeting the mourners, directing them to the right room, collecting their Mass cards, and asking them to sign the book or to take their seats for the Rosary. At the home wakes, you stand at the door of the apartment, he said, you take coats, you indicate where the body is laid out. I would be especially helpful to him when they were holding a wake here at the funeral parlor and another in someone’s home, as the “older ones” still preferred, when it was sometimes difficult for him to be in two places at once.

He laughed again and said, “To tell you the truth, it’s always difficult for me to be in two places at once. You might say impossible,” and he raised his gingery eyebrows. I felt more relief still to see that he was not a solemn man.

He placed his elbows on his desk and held his hands before him. They were large, well-padded hands that nevertheless, perhaps because they were so pale, looked weightless. “Two things you’ll do for this establishment,” he said, “as I see it,” and moved his hands up and down as if measuring one against the other. “The first I’ll try and put”—he searched for the word—“delicately.” And raised his eyebrows again. “We are all men here,” he said, “me and my two assistants, although, of course, the bodies we receive are of men and women equally. Maybe more women, to tell you the truth. Husbands and sons and brothers go up to the coffin of their female relatives and they see the work we’ve done: the hair, the rouge, the nice burial dress. Without saying a word about it they might start thinking—I mean some of them, not all—that a certain lack of”—he paused and glanced with some concern over his big fingers and directly into my face, which I felt was growing warm—“privacy might have been involved in the preparation of the body.”

He paused again, looked at me for my reaction, and then smiled, as if he was satisfied that the worst of what he had to say was over. “Of course, no one mentions this. In my twenty years in the business, not a single husband or father or brother or son has ever said a word—about this, I mean—but I figure the thought has got to be there. So I’ve always had a woman in the business. Not to do the work, of course. Not to handle the bodies. Holy smoke.” And he let both weightless hands sink to the desk for a second, as if to recover from the thought. “But to provide some kind of answer for the men who might think about it, the privacy bit, if you see what I mean. They can tell themselves”—he altered his voice, making it suddenly pensive—’Well, he has that nice young woman who works for him. Maybe she’s the one who buttoned up her dress or put the lipstick on her or fixed her hair.’ And telling themselves this, they’re freed in a way. They don’t have to think about it no further.”

He paused again to gauge my reaction. I only nodded to show that I understood, although, to tell the truth (this, I was also to learn, was Mr. Fagin’s favorite refrain), I didn’t, not then.

In the green and golden tree behind him, the sun-struck leaves moved with the hopping shadows of birds. A sweet autumnal breeze came through the opened window, only briefly touched with the odor of back alley garbage.

“And then there’s this,” Mr. Fagin said, once more turning his attention to the two ideas he had cupped in his broad hands. “The vigil, whether it’s long or short, is a burden on the brain. I don’t mean the wake,” he said quickly. “The wake is more of a relief than most people realize. I mean the vigil before someone dies. You probably know this from your own poor father”—poorr fadah—“No one had to tell me when I got the body here that he’d had a terrible ordeal. I could see it for myself. And after a long sickness like that, every brain of every person who stood vigil is numb. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this.” And I averted my eyes for a moment, dropped them to my lap so they would not fill with tears. I had spent the vigil for my father in the hospital’s lobby, reading magazines, watching various strangers pass by, many of them carrying cones of flowers or teddy bears, some of them crying. It was my mother and Gabe who had stood by my father’s bed.

“And a sudden death is no different—worse, I think,” Mr. Fagin said. “Look at Pegeen. Because when there’s a sudden death, everybody thinks about all the days before, the days that were a vigil, after all, a vigil everyone was living through but nobody knew it.” He shook his shoulders, seemed to shudder a little. “Worse,” he said. “But here’s where you come in.” He flattened out his right hand and extended it toward me, as if to say, Here you are. “You are the consoling angel,” he said, indicating me with his big hand. “The very sight of you gives comfort to a weary eye.” He snapped the extended fingers into a fist, leaving only the thick thumb, which he shook at the bookcase over his shoulder. “In Charles Dickens’s day and age,” he said, “they always had child mourners. Professional child mourners. I got the idea from him. It’s in Oliver Twist, the book that besmirches my good name.” He smiled wryly. “Have you read David Copperfield?”

And because I wasn’t yet sure I wanted the job, I had no impulse to lie. “No,” I said. I had read A Christmas Carol at Manual and had been frustrated to learn that no one could say, not even my English teacher, if Scrooge had indeed been visited by spirits or had only dreamed it.

“You should,” Mr. Fagin said. And suddenly he stood to take the book from the shelf. He was a large, broad man in his suit, and yet his small head made him seem younger than he was. As he turned back to me with the book in his hands, one of the remaining volumes tilted softly into the empty space. It would remain just so my ten years at Fagin’s until I returned the book to him on my last day—married by then and expecting my first child—apologizing that I just kept losing the thread of the tale.

Mr. Fagin sat down again and slid David Copperfield across his desk. I took the book in my gloved hand and placed it on my lap. It was heavier than a missal.

“They knew what they were doing in those days,” Mr. Fagin continued. “It’s rest for the weary eye at the end of a long vigil, the sight of someone young, a lovely young woman such as yourself. It reminds us of life. Life again, which is also the hope of resurrection.”

He was silent for a moment, assessing me. Now my cheeks were burning. I had never before heard myself referred to as a lovely young woman. Then he looked down into his own palms, as if to be sure he had given full measure to each one of the two things he had intended to say. He placed his hands on the desk again and looked up.

“Is that your only suit?” he asked.

The question surprised me. I said yes, and then added, not even sure yet I wanted the job, “I can always borrow another.”

“Have you got some nice dresses?” he asked.

I said yes again, but without much conviction, and he said, as if to himself, “Probably high-school things. Skirts and sweaters.”

I said, “Sure.”

“Dresses will be better for visiting hours,” he said. “Wool, in dark colors, but not black. Navy or deep green is good. Trim and neat. Elegant. With a touch of perfume behind the ears. Betty uses Evening in Paris.”

He reached into his desk drawer and took out a small card, slid it across the desk. “Muriel in the ladies’ department at Abraham & Straus downtown. Go see her. She knows her stuff. She’ll help you pick something out. I’ve got an account. Buy yourself five nice dresses and put them on my account. Bring your mother, too. Your mother knows good quality. You won’t go wrong.”

I picked up the card and slipped it between the pages of the book.

Again he studied my face. “Can you see without those glasses?” he asked.

“Pretty well,” I said, lying, because now I did want the job. I had never in my life bought five new dresses all at once. It was a struggle to get my mother to pay for just one every season. Five at once. I had never even heard of such a thing.

“Take them off,” he said, and I did. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

The sun on the golden leaves behind him was strong enough to smear his pink hand with light.

“Two,” I said.

He laughed. “Three. But you didn’t squint. Good for you. Nothing worse than a four-eyed girl squinting. You can wear them here in the office, but take them off when you’re at a wake. I don’t think you’ll fall down any stairs.”

I nodded and slipped my glasses back on. He studied me again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

He stood and I stood, and once again he wordlessly directed me to the door. In the paneled vestibule he held out his hand. It was large and soft and gentle in its grip. The hands that had received my poor father’s ravaged body. Just beyond him I could see a room with chairs and flowers and the edge of a shining coffin. I looked back at Mr. Fagin, the thick book tucked against my chest as if I had just come from church. My hand was still in his, and I knew in an instant, as if it was something I could actually recall, that it was Fagin who had lifted me to kiss Pegeen Chehab in her coffin, all those years ago.

The job proved to be as simple as he had described it. I followed Betty, a robust brunette, for a week, and from then on did as Betty had done, speaking softly but saying little and staying mostly out of the way while the friends and relatives of the deceased gathered to console and to gossip and, not infrequently, to argue with one another in hushed and furious whispers. I rode in the hearse, in the front seat beside the driver, to cemeteries all over the city—up to the Bronx, out to Queens, even to Long Island, which I had seen before only during the long train ride to Gabe’s seminary. I stood behind the mourners with my heels sinking into the dirt as the vigil came to a close in what felt like country sunlight or tree-muffled rain, among the gray cityscape of tombstones. I glanced into leafy neighborhoods where I resolved someday I would live, and when I came back to the funeral parlor with a bit of sun on my cheeks or grass on my good shoes Mr. Fagin joked that he wouldn’t have to sponsor a Fresh Air kid this year, I was it.

On occasion I saw, and began to understand, the first point Mr. Fagin had tried to make that morning. A grieving husband or father might look on the old wife or the young daughter, nodding sadly at the words of comfort—she looks so lovely, so peaceful, her beauty restored—and then suddenly glance up and around. Even without my glasses, I could make out how their eyes fell on Fagin himself in the back of the room, or on one of his young assistants at the door, and for an instant I could almost see it, glasses or no: the unwelcome thought of what the wife’s, the mother’s, the daughter’s body—at Fagin’s we said simply “the body”—had been through in the hours since her death. Who had touched her and how. And then they would look at me and an answer of sorts would be provided; they would, perhaps even without knowing it, rest assured.

The second point, the one that had to do with David Copperfield, was less clear. But I began to have a sense of this, too, as the weeks went by. I dotted Evening in Paris behind my ears and on my wrists, and the scent, along with the good dresses from A&S, and the expensive heels my mother had provided, seemed to raise my station in life, seemed to lend me a maturity I had not had before. I saw grown women, women my mother’s age, duck their heads shyly when I quietly greeted them at the funeral parlor door. Old men gratefully took my hand or steadied themselves on my extended arm. Young men who might not have given me a second glance on the street touched their hearts and whispered, “Thank you, thank you very much,” when I directed them to a chair or handed them a remembrance card as they were leaving. Once, and then twice, and then three times over the course of my first year at Fagin’s, one of these young men was waiting for me when I left the funeral parlor or the apartment house at the end of the evening, waiting to ask for my name.

Never once did I have to venture to the basement of the place, although I grew to recognize the particular odor of what went on down there when it wove its way through the heavier scents of the funeral flowers, and my perfume, and the general Brooklyn air: a cloying, vinegary smell that wafted up on occasion but quickly dissipated if I opened a window or fanned the front door. But neither did I fear, after the first few weeks, the sight of the corpse laid out in its coffin at the front of the room.

If the body was a child’s, rare enough but not uncommon in my time at Fagin’s, I would simply leave my glasses off and avert my eyes. I learned how to drift out of the room at the sound of a mother’s keening. Despite the many times, over the years, I had thought of Pegeen Chehab as I stood at the head of a long set of stairs, I never considered until I got to Fagin’s the variety of missteps that might take a child from the world: burst appendix, whooping cough, consumption, pneumonia, lead poisoning, the infection from a dog bite once (an angel, Mr. Fagin had said, of the little girl), and accidents, accidents. Run over, drowned, electrocuted by a table fan; one lanky boy had tried to leap between rooftops and fell instead into the lightless areaway—even in his coffin you could see how new his body had been to him.

Later I would tell my own children when they complained that as a mother I had been overcautious about the simplest things, anxious, superstitious, plagued by dreams of disaster: “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I’ve seen.”

But I quickly came to feel that there was a numbing sameness about the full-grown dead, young or old, male or female. It might have had to do with the particularities of Mr. Fagin’s art—I’d heard the two assistants complaining more than once about his heavy-handedness with rouge—it might have been that every mortician, like any artist, from Al Capp to Leonardo da Vinci, had his own recognizable style, a style that could make everyone look alike.

But it was also, I came to believe, the very lifelessness of the bodies that made them all somehow indistinguishable and anonymous. Although it was a favorite refrain among the mourners, there was never any question in my mind that the body at the front of the room was “only sleeping.” No natural sleep looked like that, no eyes that might flutter open again were ever stitched closed in just that way. And then there was the feel of them, of hand or cheek or arm: stiff and cold and as hard as if they’d been stuffed with horsehair. Even among the many faces I knew—I saw, in my years with Fagin, my fifth grade teacher, Dora Ryan’s father, the man who sold Italian ices from a pushcart, old Mrs. Fagin, Mr. Chehab, and, of course, Bill Corrigan himself—there was little continuity between the living and the dead. I was some months at Fagin’s before I found the courage to reach into a coffin to adjust a curl or a fallen pair of rosaries, or to brush away an errant bit of lipstick, but having done it once, I was quickly cavalier.

When the boys who waited for me outside the wake, and then later, the uniformed young men who began to fill the city once the war began, asked how I could bear it—being in the presence of the dead day after day—I blew smoke into the air and laughed casually. “They’re just bodies,” I would say. “Like dolls. Like empty shells. Might as well be a sack of potatoes.”

A starting point, on more than one occasion, for the boys’ own arguments, later in the evening, when they slipped their hands inside my blouse or over my stockings, “We’re only bodies, after all, just dolls.” It was an argument I was more often than not happy to let them make, up to a point. By the time I reached my twenties, my heartbreak was mended, I suppose—much as the notion of what might have been still lingered: the bright wedding in the pretty church, not to mention that house in the country—but I was no fool.

I said as much to Gabe very late one evening—early morning, in fact, the dawn just striking the kitchen window, lighting up the curtain in the dining room but not yet reaching the couch where he sat in his robe and his slippers, a book in his hands, waiting up for me. I had come in from a date with a GI whose mother we had buried just yesterday. He was a quiet boy, somewhere in the middle of a pack of twelve children. The children, and the various aunts and uncles and cousins who attended them, had filled Fagin’s parlor and hallway and vestibule with thunderous shouts of laughter and greeting and argument and conversation and tears. So many people that when the priest led them all in the Rosary at the end of each night, the volume of their collective response—Holy Mary, Mother of God—was enough, Fagin said, to blow the feathers off the wings of the Angel Gabriel himself.

But Rory, my date, was a subdued young man, skinny and long-faced. I had taken his cap from him when he first came in, and for the next three days he was my shadow. Homely, from what I could see of him. In uniform already, home from Camp Crowder to bury his mother and back to soldiering tomorrow—today, I corrected myself, explaining it all to Gabe. After the funeral and the drive to Gate of Heaven, we’d had dinner together, seen a movie, and then I had gone with him to his house to get his kit. There was some crisis with the plumbing, there were children in pajamas everywhere, holding their noses, crying, laughing, battering one another with what looked like broomsticks and plungers, the chaotic world happily closed up over their mother’s disappearance. It seemed hardly a one of them noticed that the poor guy was leaving. So out of sympathy alone, I told Gabe, I went with him to the station to wait for his train, where we necked ferociously (I didn’t tell Gabe this) and shared a bag of doughnuts and a fifth of whiskey (nor this) until 5:15.

I’d taken a cab home, an extravagance, yes, but wasn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

Gabe sat in the middle of the couch, in his bathrobe and his slippers. “I’ve made up my mind to enlist, too,” he said softly. “Better to get in early.” I felt myself sway a little, still drunk. For all the anxieties that would plague me as a mother, for all the superstitions I’d absorbed as a child, my first thought on hearing this was not for Gabe’s safety but for his room and his bed, which would be mine once again if he went into the army.

“Now I’m sitting here worrying about leaving Momma alone.”

I had the impulse to sit down next to him, to pat his hand, but the whiskey I’d been drinking made me hesitate. He had lectured me already. Have just one drink when you go out, it’s easy enough to do. A boy will respect you for it. He’ll be grateful not to have to pay for more. “If you allow yourself license in little things,” he’d told me, quoting someone or other, “little by little, you’ll be ruined.”

“Momma won’t be here alone,” I said, shifting my unsteady weight from one leg to the other. “I’m here.”

He lifted his arm, tapped on his watch. “It’s six a.m.,” he said, reasonably enough. “You haven’t been home all day. You’re just getting in.”

I looked around the narrow room to avoid his frown. “Oh come on,” I said, trying to make my tongue behave. “This was a special case. A kid going back to camp. Just buried his mother. I couldn’t leave him at the station alone. It’s not like I stay out this late every night.” Although I had another date that very evening with the florist’s boy, who was also joining up.

Gabe looked at his hands. “You run around too much,” he said. “It’s not good, Marie. I know you want to make up for what happened with Walter, you want to prove something about yourself. Your attractiveness, I suppose. But this is no way to go about it. Drinking, running around. You’ll get yourself into trouble instead.”

I knew what he meant by “get yourself into trouble,” and I was astonished to discover how furious I became—a lightning bolt of black fury running across my scalp. Furious to discover that he thought of me in this way: that his thoughts had crept in this direction, sitting here in the dark with his book, his prayer book no less, waiting for me to come home. Thinking here in the darkness that I was out somewhere in the city—where, the cold benches of the train station?—baring myself to a stranger, going as far as you could go just to prove Walter Hartnett wrong.

I drew myself up, only a little unsteadily. “Damn priest,” I said under my breath, but loud enough for him to hear. I would not have said it without the whiskey. “Holier than thou.” Nor that. “With your filthy mind,” I said, and it was the whiskey, as well as the truth in what he had said about Walter Hartnett, that tricked me into sudden tears. “I do not let anyone take liberties,” I said. “I do not. And I won’t let you think that I do.” I stamped my foot. “I will not.” I saw him glance behind me, to the room where my mother slept, and I said, again, a little more softly but no less furious, “I will not.”

I opened the purse on my arm. Inside was the empty bottle of whiskey: a memento of the evening. There was also the timetable Rory had written his address on and my handkerchief, covered with the lipstick and cinnamon sugar I had wiped from his mouth before he ran for the train. I took out the handkerchief and held it to my nose: Evening in Paris and Old Spice. It had been a lovely night.

Gabe rose from the couch and lightly, with some distance still between us, put his hands on my shoulders. More to keep me from waking our mother, I suspected, than to comfort me in my only partially righteous indignation—I had, after all, allowed some liberties. I bowed my head to avoid his earnest face. “What do you know about anything?” I asked him, defiant. “A lonely bachelor like you. What do you know? You’re not married.”

He may have laughed a little, and his amusement was suddenly more infuriating to me than his censure. I looked up at him and said, “Go get yourself married, momma’s boy. Go marry Agnes”—and said her name the way a streetwise, mocking child might say it, the kind of child I had never been—“then you can tell me what to do.”

Gabe pursed his lips and his face was suddenly regretful, as if the harsh words had been his own. He dropped his hands from my shoulders, held them out as if to show me they were empty. “Some vows can’t be broken,” he said evenly.

I had to look away. I understood how firmly he believed this, but I muttered, “Nonsense,” anyway. It was all a tangle, my brother’s faith, his vocation, his vows, his failure, and it only made me impatient to think of it, after such a lovely night. I wished he could be a simpler kind of man.

I stamped my foot again. “Apologize,” I demanded.

He stepped away. I did not look up. I could hear the dawn birds, pigeons and sparrows, at the kitchen window. There was more early sunlight still across the carpet roses. I saw how the light touched his long feet in their slippers, the pale flesh of his insteps, as white as marble.

“All right,” I heard him whisper above my head. “I’m sorry. I suppose I didn’t put it very well.” He stepped back farther still. “I’m only thinking of your welfare,” he said. “I’m here to be your guide.”

I put the fragrant handkerchief to my nose. The long-faced Rorys of the world, sweet as they might be, would have their work cut out for them, trying to hold a candle to this earnest brother of mine.

I raised my eyes, to his neat pajamas and the brown flannel robe crossed over his chest, and then to the pale flesh of his throat. I felt some sudden tenderness: instep and throat, were there any places on a body more vulnerable and sad? Had I said he was lonely?

He whispered, “None of us knows the hour, Marie. Surely you understand this by now, with all your time at Fagin’s.” And I shifted my weight again. “It’s as simple as this,” he said. “I don’t want you ever to be in a state of sin. Not for a moment. I don’t want any of us to run that risk. I want us to be together in eternity. The way we once were.” And I saw him make some gesture toward the dining-room table and its white cloth and the simple chandelier, all of it looking distant and colorless now in the early-morning light. “All of us together again, the way we used to be. Dad with us again.”

And I suddenly held up my hand: he would have me blubbering. “Stop it,” I said, so firmly he took a step back. It was as if I could hear his teeth snap closed. “You’ve said enough,” I told him.

Before he left the room, he showed me the blanket and the pillow he’d placed on what we called the lady chair in the corner. “Sleep on the couch,” he said. “You’ll surely wake Momma if you go in there now. I’ll tell her you came home,” and he looked at his watch again, raising his pale eyebrows, “much earlier.”

I nodded. But I was still angry or indignant or sorry or embarrassed enough to refuse the kindness. And the light was not so dim in his corner of the room that I failed to see how this disappointed him. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He aimed for a jollier tone. “Fools’ thoughts are in their mouths, the Bible says. A wise man keeps his words in his heart.”

I turned my back to him. I had learned at Fagin’s just how to hold myself aloof whenever someone else’s sorrow threatened to send me sprawling. “Yeah, well,” I said coolly, “not everything’s in a book.”

I heard him say, “No doubt.” He said, “Pray for me, anyway, will you?” reminding me—how quickly I had forgotten it—that he was going to enlist. I had to shift my weight once again. And then he turned to the short hallway that led back to my mother’s bedroom and, beyond it, the room we once had shared.

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind,” Mr. Fagin said early in my tenure, “every once in a while, when things are quiet here, to go up and have a word with my mother.”

The third-floor apartment was all Irish lace: lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses, and a lace handkerchief in her pale hands. She was a tiny old woman with a small, pale, pretty face. The apartment was as neat as a pin, and there were always small vases of rearranged funeral flowers on the mantel and the windowsills, on the sideboard and the tea table.

I never found Mrs. Fagin alone, which was surprising, since I so seldom caught sight of her visitors coming in. But every time I climbed the stairs and knocked gently at the apartment door, I heard from behind it the energetic scuffle of another visitor. There would be tea and cake already set out, or a light lunch, or a kettle already whistling in the kitchen. An old Sister of Charity in her pioneer cap would be there, or one of the nursing sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, often both. Other old immigrant ladies of all shapes and sizes stepping out of the kitchen, bringing in another chair. Mrs. Fagin always sat in the middle of the high-backed couch, her little feet in black shoes barely touching the floor. She always threw up her hands in delight when I entered the room and touched the space beside her and said something charming and lyrical, “You’re as welcome as the flowers in May” or “Here’s a sight for sore eyes.”

The nuns had to turn their heads to smile at me from within their caps and wimples. I often had the impression that I had just interrupted a long, whispered story one of them was telling. They always seemed to me to be just leaning back. There always seemed to me to be a silenced breath hanging on the air. “God love you,” Mrs. Fagin would say as I came into the neat room. “You’ve just brightened our day.” Although there was no denying, as I came into the lacy, sun-washed room, that their day had already been going along quite brightly.

I sat beside Mrs. Fagin on the stiff couch, or if another old woman or one of the older Sisters was already there, I’d take a single chair. “Now,” Mrs. Fagin would say when I had my cup, “what’s going on downstairs?”

I would name for her whoever was being waked that evening, or whose family had called that morning to inquire about Fagin’s services, or whose body had arrived from the morgue and was currently being prepared. The old lady would cock her head at each name. She had bright blue eyes and pure white hair. Like her son, she might once have been a redhead. “Oh yes,” she’d say if she knew them, or if the name didn’t ring a bell, she would look to the other women in the room until she found the one who could say, “Oh, sure,” and fill her in on the deceased’s pedigree. “That’s Bridget Verde’s niece’s girl,” they might say. Or, “Tommy Cute’s a friend of his,” or—this mostly from the nursing sisters, who, it seemed, at one point or other had had most of the bodies that came into Fagin’s in their care—“a slow death there,” or “a weak heart,” or “His mother, too, died the same way.” When all else failed, one of them would fetch the paper and look for an obituary.

Recollections were raised, sorted, compiled. If there was a good story attached to the life of the dead, whatever woman among them had it would be given the floor, and whatever part of the story was deemed, perhaps, too delicate for the old lady’s ears (or, more likely, mine) would be acted out with a series of gestures and nods and sudden silences that I quickly came to be able to interpret as readily as the rest. A finger held to the side of a nose indicated a deception, a pantomimed bottle raised to the mouth meant there was a problem with drink, the rubbing of thumb and forefinger meant money problems (usually because someone, most likely a spouse, was cheap), eyebrows raised and words falling off into a long nod indicated sex (“and he was coming home every night while she was still losing blood and …”)—eyebrows, nod, and all the other women would cluck their tongues in sympathy.

Sitting among them, I sometimes recalled the whispering girls on the stoops of my childhood. I sometimes felt just as lost about the tales they proposed. But there was a sense, too, in their sorting out of recollection and rumor, of gossip, anecdote, story—and even in their disappointment when a body came to the funeral parlor, a stranger or out-of-towner whom none of them could produce a single word for—of some duty on their part, Mrs. Fagin and her attendants, to weave a biography of sorts for the newly dead.

I say duty, but there was nothing heavy or morbid about these conversations; there was, rather, an eager, industrious, even entertaining, pleasantness in all of it, which is probably why the apartment always seemed to me to be full of light and the aftermath of some laughter. Or maybe it was just the cups of sweet tea that they served me. “What’s going on downstairs?” Mrs. Fagin would ask, wanting me to name the recent dead. And when I did, she and her compatriots would lean together to tell as best they could the story of the life—breathing words onto cold embers was how I sometimes thought of it, and, one way or another, getting them to glow.

This is how I came to know the fate of Big Lucy, whose mother was waked at Fagin’s in the early forties. Mrs. Meany was a huge woman, with a goiter in her neck that Fagin had powdered as heavily as he had powdered her fat cheeks. But the results were unsatisfactory. Even with the makeup, there remained something awful about the globe of purple, translucent flesh squashed beneath her chin. After the first night of the wake, Fagin had gone downstairs and come back with a broad swathe of pale green chiffon that he wrapped around her head and neck so elaborately that when the family returned the next day Mrs. Meany no longer resembled “her unfortunate self”—as Mr. Fagin put it—but a kind of mummified dowager queen, which pleased them all immensely. The Meany family was what my mother would have called shanty Irish: large and broad-faced men and women, hardly well scrubbed, with a kind of dumb shyness to them as they entered Fagin’s neat parlor and only reluctantly let me take their hats and coats. They whispered awkwardly to one another through the first hour of the wake, but then, as they grew accustomed to the place, began to sprawl and to laugh and to treat Fagin’s chairs and lamps and good rugs with a kind of proprietary pride, pointing out a painting on the wall or the quality of the drapes to various visitors as if they themselves had selected and paid for them. Which, Mr. Fagin reminded me when I mentioned this to him, they more or less had.

Mrs. Meany, I learned in Mrs. Fagin’s upstairs room, had made the trip—by subway, ferry, bus, and bus—to her daughter’s Staten Island asylum every Sunday—every Sunday, it was repeated, rain or shine, for all the years since Big Lucy had vanished from the neighborhood. Lugging, the ladies said, her considerable weight and her thick legs and a shopping bag full of the cakes she had baked (not to mention the swaying baggage—as I thought of it—of that goiter) all the way out to that godforsaken place just to sit for a few hours with the girl, now a woman, who in her derangement spoke only of the most vulgar things. The poor woman, they said, poor Mrs. Meany, cried herself home every Sunday, bus, bus, ferry, subway, unable to look at any of her fellow passengers, man or woman or child, the flesh of their hands and arms and legs, their bodies beneath their clothes, without the terrible images evoked by her daughter’s dirty words rising to her mind like bile to the throat.

Because the devil uses dirty words, Mrs. Fagin added, instructing me, her tiny finger held in the air, to make us believe that we’re only the sum and substance of ugly things.

But Mrs. Meany, see, the women went on, leaning forward, despite how her heart was broken, pulled herself together, anyway, to put on a good face for the rest of the family at home. And she went back, Sunday after Sunday, right up until the Sunday before she died. Mrs. Meany put her beautiful love—a mother’s love—against the terrible scenes that brewed like sewage in that poor girl’s troubled mind. She persevered, she baked her cakes, she hauled herself (the goiter swinging) on and off the ferry, and she sat, brokenhearted, holding her daughter’s hand, even as Lucy shouted her terrible words, proving to anyone with eyes to see that a mother’s love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish.

Collectively, the women sat back, smiling at one another and the glowing conclusion they had wrought out of Mrs. Meany’s travail.

And I, out of a certain shyness, or the deference I always felt in the presence of nuns, or perhaps out of respect for Mrs. Fagin’s decorum and bright rooms, didn’t bring myself to ask them, what would happen to Lucy now that her mother was in the ground?

Here, too, I learned the true story of Redmond Hogan’s mother. Redmond was Walter Harnett’s contemporary, one of the stickball-playing boys when I was young—one of the crowd, perhaps, who had played that brief and awful trick on Bill Corrigan when the ambulance stopped at the wrong house. He was killed at Normandy, and not six months later, his mother was waked at Fagin’s. Of course, a connection was made—Mrs. Hogan had six older children, but Redmond was her youngest, and thus, it was said, the apple of her eye. She died of a broken heart, was the consensus. It was said at her wake that when the news came of Redmond’s death, Mrs. Hogan struggled to get into her hat and coat. She was determined, come hell or high water, to head for Penn Station and the train to Washington, D.C., where she was going to march straight up to the White House and give Mr. Roosevelt what for. It was Florence, her oldest daughter—a broad redheaded woman who even in middle age had skin like porcelain—who told the story at the wake, getting everyone to laugh at her mother’s determination and how skillfully Florence had talked her out of her plan. They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond and what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.

Florence Hogan was a big, redheaded woman with beautiful skin and large brown eyes and a cashmere coat with a wide fur collar that I had tried on in Fagin’s cloakroom after I took it from her in the vestibule. It smelled wonderfully of the cold, of cigarette smoke, and of some gorgeous, spicy perfume.

In Mrs. Fagin’s living room the women leaned together as I repeated Florence’s story about the letter, and then they passed a look, from one to another—it was eye to eye, but it was as clear to me as if it were going hand to hand—before someone said, “Wasn’t Florence the beauty, when she was a girl?” It was agreed. Mrs. Fagin said, “An Irish rose,” although I knew from the wake that there were German cousins on Mrs. Hogan’s side. “A wild Irish tose,” another old lady said, and there was some rueful laughter.

Florence Hogan when young, the tale began, could have charmed the birds out of the trees. But she was a big girl who grew up fast and couldn’t have been more than sixteen when she started going with an older man from no one knew where—White Plains, one of the Sisters offered with some authority, saying it as if the words carried the same impossible implications they would have held had she said Timbuktu or Siberia, or some other far-off place of sand or snow.

Oh, but he was good-looking, Mrs. Fagin said. Very tall and dark-haired. James Redmond was his name. There wasn’t a soul in the neighborhood who could help but notice the two of them when they walked down the street together, arm in arm … they must have kept company for a good year or so, going out together night after night … and here came among the women in Mrs. Fagin’s living room the silence and the long nod.

And then James Redmond disappeared from the neighborhood, and beautiful Florence, as large and as beautiful as ever, was seen walking on her own.

It was one of the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor—a chubby nun with a firm and serious face—who took up the tale then, because she remembered the Sister, her compatriot, who had attended Redmond Hogan’s birth twenty-five years ago. We were all leaning forward by now, although I suspect I was the only one among them who had never heard this before—a testament, perhaps, to my own naïveté or to the neighborhood’s ability to leave unspoken whatever it was that one of our members wished to remain unspoken.

It was Florence, the nun said matter-of-factly, who gave birth to her brother. Poor Redmond. God rest his soul. Mary Jane Hogan’s youngest child.

For a moment as I listened I feared that everything I thought I understood about babies being born was somehow wrong—the authority of the Sister’s simple words, spoken from inside the immaculate white wimple, was so great. She had to turn her head and shoulders in order to see me on the chair beside her. “The apple of his mother’s eye,” she said, glaring at me to make sure I heard.

I was on the stair, going back to my desk just beyond the cloakroom on Fagin’s parlor floor, before I understood that it was an impossible proposition: that Florence had given birth to her little brother. Although, even then, I couldn’t help but think that the real truth of the matter, biology be damned, was all on the nun’s side.

And then there was the bishop.

We had in one of the rooms a woman who had been the housekeeper at a nearby rectory. Margaret Tuohy. She was a small pale woman with beautiful black hair—not dyed, Fagin told me with some astonishment. She was a spinster. Her body had come from Brooklyn College Hospital’s morgue, but it seemed she’d been in the care of the Little Sisters right up until the end. It was one of them who came by the funeral parlor with the dress Fagin was to put on her: a clean and simple black shift with small polka dots, a churchgoing dress for a woman her age. But later that afternoon a dress box arrived by delivery truck—from Saks Fifth Avenue. Inside was a beautiful silk suit of deep blue, a white silk blouse, and a gold cross and chain, all meant for her. And not twenty minutes after it arrived, a phone call came from a priest with a voice like a radio announcer’s. He identified himself as the secretary to His Eminence Martin D. Tuohy in Connecticut. He wanted us to know that the bishop would be attending his sister’s wake that evening. He asked if we had received “the dress,” and full up as I was with all the excitement: the delivery from Saks, the visit from a bishop, I not only said yes, we had, but then went on to tell him how lovely it was, and to thank him profusely. He in turn—since we were both speaking as proxies—told me I was very welcome. He suggested that the gold cross and chain be donated to the missions when the wake was over.

The bishop had his sister’s pale skin and black, black hair, and I wondered as I greeted him—as close as I had come to a man of such stature since my own Confirmation—if she’d had his bright blue eyes as well. He was the cleanest-looking human being I had ever met. He wore his black cassock trimmed with red and his long red cloak, his skullcap, but it was his white skin and his clear eyes and his beautiful white hands that impressed me the most. He wasn’t a tall man—his secretary, who proved to be as handsome as his voice had implied, strong jawed and attentive, was a good head taller—but as he moved into the room where his sister was laid out, his presence changed the very air. There were other priests and Sisters there—Margaret Tuohy, after all, had long been in the employ of the Church—but none of them could retain their holy luster with the bishop in the room. He went to his sister’s coffin and knelt there, his head bent. We all watched silently. Even the soles of his shoes were immaculate, as if they’d just come out of the box. We saw him bless himself and then, for the first time, it seemed, look into the coffin. He reached out to touch his sister’s hand. Then, before he stood again, he looked over his shoulder to the handsome secretary and nodded, smiling a little. Expressing his approval, it seemed to me, of the lovely suit.

And then he was gone, sweeping out with the elegance and aplomb of an angel. Fagin was disappointed, I think. I think he was hoping that the bishop would stay to lead the Rosary. Instead, one of the old priests from her parish dispatched the prayers that night with mumbling speed, licking his finger and scratching at a pale white stain on his cassock through one whole decade. He was the same priest who said her funeral Mass the next day and accompanied the body to the cemetery, where a number of other Tuohys already lay. We didn’t see her brother again.

In Mrs. Fagin’s living room I felt the women recede as I told the story of the delivery from Saks, the handsome secretary, the clean and holy fragrance of the bishop’s cloak. I was enchanted still by the excitement of his visit, but as I described it, I noticed, too, how the women looked away now and then in the bright room, turning their chins into their shoulders the way workmen or baseball players or boys in the street might do as they prepared to spit.

“Martin Tuohy,” one of the old immigrant ladies said solemnly when I was finished, “has done very well for himself.” And the chorus of agreement with which this statement was met did not indicate approval. His family had been poor, they informed me. The poorest of the poor, they said. Coming to Brooklyn from the Lower East Side, living “from pillar to post” in any number of neighborhoods. The father a dockworker, when he worked. The mother a washerwoman, when she could. There had been other siblings, but they had disappeared long ago. Only Martin and Margaret left by the time they came to our neighborhood, Martin being “assumed”—I gathered they meant as in the Assumption—into the seminary not long after they arrived, still a boy.

I thought of Gabe, who was overseas by then, and the priest who had sat at our dining-room table, telling my parents over tea that there was clearly a vocation.

His sister Margaret, the women said, “putting it kindly,” hadn’t much wherewithal. Not a whit—they said—of her brother’s intelligence or good looks, which surprised me, since I had seen the resemblance between the two in the black hair and the pale skin. But I also knew something by then of how thin the line could be between the best-looking people who had all the advantages and the rest of us.

She had none of her brother’s instinctive refinement, either, they said.

“All dees, dems, and doses,” was how they described her. “A sweet soul,” they added, mitigating their own unkindness. “But you wouldn’t find her dancing at the Waldorf.” Nor attending, it seemed, her brother’s ordination, or elevation to bishop, or any of the elegant occasions of his rarefied career. He got her the job at the rectory, the women said, give him credit for that. But no one caught him stopping by to visit her in all these years, and when the Little Sisters who took care of her in her decline—it was cancer of the lower parts, they said—asked at the rectory if her brother the bishop shouldn’t be informed that the hour of her death was near, they were told by the parish priest, “It has been duly noted. Her brother is keeping her in his prayers.” She died without laying her eyes on anything but the big photograph she had of him in his cape and his cross, on a handful of newspaper clippings she had found here and there over the years, and on the impressive collection of Christmas tins that she kept on the mantel of her little room all year round—the tins that had held the fruitcakes her brother the bishop had sent her year after solitary year.

There was a sudden silence in Mrs. Fagin’s room. I was aware of the women touching teacups to their saucers, or folding and unfolding their hands.

Not that there was a drop of resentment in Margaret Tuohy, one of the nuns said softly. Simple soul that she was. She knew her brother was an important and holy man, busy with the Lord’s work.

Certainly, another said.

I felt their glances touching me from here and there. I felt them exchanging, through their glances, some communication with one another. I became aware of how rapturous I had been just moments before, describing the bishop’s visit, his clean hands, the lovely clothes he had sent. They were warning one another, I could tell, not to infect my awe of the man with their own clear-eyed assessment.

I said into their silence, “It was really a gorgeous suit. A blue like I’ve never seen. It must have cost a fortune.” Siding, I knew, with the elegant bishop and his handsome secretary.

The ladies murmured their responses, Oh, sure, no doubt, allowing me, I could tell, my right to be taken in.

But then little Mrs. Fagin, her feet barely touching the sunlit floor, raised her white eyebrows and smiled and crooned over her teacup, her brogue, I am certain, kicked up a notch, “Saks Fifth Avenue no less.”

The words put a stake through the heart of the bishop’s pretensions, and my own. In truth, Miss Tuohy’s body in its coffin had looked a bit lost in the blue silk of the suit. Her brother couldn’t have known, Fagin said, how her last illness had whittled her body to bone.

I bowed my head to take a sip of the cold, sweet tea, and when I looked up again, they were all smiling at me with their clear eyes, gracious and sorrowful and forgiving. Gently sorry, as was their way, for the silly child I was and perhaps would always be, enchanted by baubles, taken in by fools.

Of course, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the bishop’s sister’s fate and my own. Walking down Fagin’s dark staircase that afternoon, I imagined what the ladies in Mrs. Fagin’s living room would have to say about me were I to lose my footing à la Pegeen Chehab and fall fatally down the stairs. I suspected my poorr father would be mentioned (there would be the gesture of a raised glass), my poorr mother, yet another widow in her top-floor aviary (the rubbing, perhaps, of finger and thumb). I wondered if any of the ladies gathered upstairs had ever seen me walking out with Walter Hartnett.

But it was Gabe, I knew, who would give my brief life story the kind of turn that made the ladies lean forward … a handsome boy, his parents’ pride, and only a year at his first parish before he came back home without his collar. A mystery. I imagined them all—tiny Mrs. Fagin and her lace-curtain friends, the Sisters in their wimples or their caps—raising their eyebrows and letting their words fall off into that long nod … though I couldn’t say then what it might have meant.

I could not have said then if Gabe’s history added scandal to my own, or merely some pity. But I was certain they would know, the ladies in Fagin’s upper room. They would know the clear-eyed truth of it. And they would know as well how to choose their words to tell a kinder tale.

And then, of course, inevitably, given the size of the parish and Fagin’s steady business there, Walter Hartnett walked through the funeral parlor door.

It was at Bill Corrigan’s wake. It was one of the long winters during the war.

Only the week before, I had come up from the subway on a wet but warm Saturday evening after a day of spitting rain. It was the gulley of water at the curb that gave the first hint of something wrong. I had been downtown shopping all day, seeing Muriel at A&S and meeting Gerty and Durna for lunch. We had sat by the window in the restaurant, we had been in and out of the stores. It had not rained very hard downtown that day, and yet there was a river rush of water along the dark curb when I got out of the subway. When I turned the corner of my own street, I saw the fire truck under the streetlights. The firemen were still putting away their black hoses as I approached, and there were small knots of people still gathered on the sidewalk here and there. There were windows open in Bill Corrigan’s building, thin, pale curtains waved out from some of them. The first group I came to was made up of poor Mr. and Mrs. Chehab and some other neighbors, as well as Mrs. Shapiro, the landlady who lived on our parlor floor. I had the impression they’d been outside a long time, the way they huddled, and shivered. All the women had wrapped themselves in their own arms, holding their sweaters and coats tightly around their chests, grasping their own forearms and shoulders with hands made pale by the streetlight.

“It’s Bill,” Mrs. Shapiro said as I approached, hushed and astonished. “He put his head in the oven,” she said. “While his mother was out. Killed himself with the gas.”

Tall Mrs. Chehab looked down at me with her mouth closed tightly over her teeth and her eyes wide.

“There was a little explosion, I guess,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, “when they forced open the door. Stupid.” She touched her forehead. “The super couldn’t see, so he lit a match. The dope.”

“Idiot,” Mr. Chehab said angrily.

“He didn’t know,” another woman said.

“An explosion and a fire,” Mrs. Shapiro said again. She was a thin and wiry woman with a worn face. “They got the fire out pretty quickly. They just took the body away.” As she spoke, the fire truck, popping and wheezing, began to move.

Across the street a group of women were gathered around the steps of the house beside the Corrigans’. Old Mrs. Corrigan, in her hat and her coat as if she had just come home, was in the midst of them, sitting like a child on the stoop. A large woman sat beside her. Another, Mrs. Lee from the candy store, was crouching at her feet. My mother was there, too, leaning toward the old woman, who was shaking her head and beating her fist against her lap, a keening gesture I had come to know very well. There was a taste of the fire engine’s fuel in the wet air and, less precise, the taste of scorched wood. I could hear Mrs. Corrigan’s sobs from where I stood, and the women’s whispered urging to come inside, out of the cold and the damp. Mr. Chehab was saying in his gentle lilt, “Why in the world would he do such a thing? Why in the world?”

At my shoulder, Mrs. Shapiro held herself more tightly and shook her head and pinched her nostrils.

“It was a lonely life for him,” she said, finishing the tale.

Because this was one of the long winters during the war, the boys grown to men who had known Bill Corrigan for most of their lives were mostly elsewhere now, fighting. Gabe himself was at an air base in England. Bill Corrigan’s wake, then, was filled with the older people from the neighborhood, and the neighborhood girls like me, but few enough of the stickball kids who had first made him their umpire, their seer and their sage. Despite this, his mother, who I learned had for family only a sister and a niece from Greenpoint, wanted the three full days of viewing.

Because he had taken his life by his own hand, Bill Corrigan would have no funeral Mass at Mary Star of the Sea, and he could not be buried in Gate of Heaven, where his father and an infant brother lay. Although Mr. Fagin had turned away suicides before, Catholic suicides—no need to get on the wrong side of the Church—he reasoned that this three-day wake was all that Mrs. Corrigan would have, and he gave her the whole affair, coffin and all, gratis, in sympathy.

Bill was a veteran, after all, Mr. Fagin told me. He might have had a good life if he hadn’t gone over. It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is. There should be some accommodation for that fact, he said. Some bending. He struck his desk with his big hand.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “the damn Church is blind to life sometimes, blind.” And then blessed himself and begged my pardon. “And don’t dare tell anybody I said so.”

It was the beginning of the evening of the second day of the wake. Because the parish priests had to show their disapprobation, it was Fagin who had led the Rosary the night before and would do so again tonight. There would be another crowd, mostly the same neighbors who had been here last night, many of whom had been here this afternoon as well. And would be again tomorrow. But for now it was just old Mrs. Corrigan with her stooped sister and her middle-aged niece, back from dinner and resettling themselves in the front row of chairs—but not before they had, it was a ritual I had observed many times by now, looked into the coffin again, as if to check for any changes while they were gone. I saw Mrs. Corrigan brush a bit of something, nothing most likely, from her big son’s lapel. Only a habit of mothering.

It was during Bill Corrigan’s wake that I considered for the first time what an effort of will it must have been for Mrs. Corrigan, over all these years, to keep her son in his neat suit and his pressed shirt and his polished shoes day after day. I wondered if it hadn’t been the suit all along that gave Bill Corrigan his skills as an umpire, his second sight—at least as far as the boys in the street were concerned. A transformation, it occurred to me then, not unlike the one Mr. Fagin’s five dresses had worked in my life.

I stood in the doorway as the three woman settled in. I still had my glasses on. I had added more remembrance cards to the small stand—Mrs. Corrigan had chosen one meant for children: a small boy with a great winged guardian angel by his side, knocking on heaven’s door—and I was just turning to a new page of the visitors’ book when I looked up and saw a subtle shift in the yellow sidelight beside the front door. A small shadow passing under the electric lamp at the entrance that to my now-practiced eye meant a visitor had arrived. Before I had a chance to take my glasses off, the big door was slowly pushed open and Walter Hartnett limped in. It was the limp, of course, I knew, that had kept him from the war.

He took off his hat and looked around. He had not changed much. His hair might have thinned a bit. His face might have been a bit fuller. A little heavier altogether, I thought, as he saw me in the doorway and smiled—same grin—and made his way across the vestibule. I smelled the liquor on his breath as soon as he spoke.

“Hello there, Marie,” he said, same wide-open grin and nice gray eyes, edged now in red, and suddenly, even before I had a chance to say, “Hello, Walter,” filling with tears. “May I take your hat?” I asked him. He gave me the hat, and then his eyes rose away from my face, to the room beyond me, to the women in their chairs, and then to the coffin where Bill Corrigan lay. Walter raised his chin and turned his head to where his eyes had already taken him. “This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said. And a large tear ran down his smooth cheek. “Old Bill,” he whispered. “What did he want to do that for?” and limped into the room.

Undone, I watched him from the door as he went to the coffin and knelt before it, the built-up shoe cast awkwardly behind him. He bowed his head, putting his forehead against the back of his folded hands. He remained like that, bent and still, for a good minute or two—old Mrs. Corrigan and her sister and her niece watching him respectfully—and then we all heard him gasp and saw his shoulders quake, rhythmically, it seemed, in a series of silent, roiling sobs.

At this point, the front door opened again as more visitors arrived, and I slipped off my glasses and turned my attention their way. When I looked back, the blur that was Walter was shaking hands with Mrs. Corrigan. He seemed to be speaking earnestly.

I watched him limp to the far corner of the room and throw himself into the farthest chair in the last row. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, ran his hands over his face and then through his hair, and then he reached into his suit jacket for a handkerchief, which he held to his nose for a moment and then returned to his inside pocket. I grew busy then, taking hats and coats into the cloakroom, greeting the same people I had greeted the night before. When I glanced back at Walter, he was once again reaching for the handkerchief inside his jacket, and this time I recognized the gesture for what it was, a reenactment of the problem-with-drink pantomime of the ladies upstairs. I knew if I had my glasses on I’d see it was not a handkerchief he withdrew from his pocket and raised to his face but a flask. When next I glanced at him, he had slumped a bit in the chair and his head was bowed. He seemed to be staring into his own hands, cupped in his lap.

When the Rosary was completed, ending the night, Walter Hartnett didn’t stir. Now I was fetching coats for the others. I had developed a strange system: I sniffed each coat when I first took it away: aftershave, perfume, mothballs, perspiration, smoke, and sniffed it again when it was called for—a strange, blind man’s way of identifying an owner, but even Mr. Fagin had remarked on its efficiency. My mother was there again that night, but since I was meeting a midshipman at the subway at ten, I told her to go on and walk home with Mrs. Chehab. My mother had seen Walter, of course, and she whispered to me now that I should go and give him a word of comfort, poor man. And with something of the confidence that Evening in Paris and my slim wool dress and my time at Fagin’s had lent me, I slipped my glasses on and went to sit beside him.

At the front of the newly quiet room—it was the rhythm and the ritual of every wake—Mr. Fagin was now standing with the three women, who were looking down again at rosy-cheeked Bill Corrigan in his casket, saying a quiet good night one more time, his mother, once again, crying silently.

Walter, watching them, nodded when I sat down, but only briefly touched his eyes to my face, and then to the front of my dress—for which I instantly forgave him because he had wept for Bill Corrigan and, perhaps, because the scent of alcohol on a man was a charm for me still.

His eyes were on the backs of the three women. “I never really had a father,” he said, and I knew immediately that he was very drunk. “My old man didn’t much care for me when I was a kid. Didn’t like the leg. Kind of like the judge now.” He laughed, but to himself. “He knocked my mother around when he was out of sorts, had nothing much to say to me, and then he was dead.” He gave the word two hard d’s, biting it off. “And that was that.” And then looked at me again. His gray eyes had lost their focus. “Big Bill was a friend to me,” he said. “We”—and he seemed to seek the word and then smiled to discover it—“we conferred, him and me. That’s what he’d say, ‘Let’s confer.’ He conferred with me and I conferred with him. Nobody ever conferred with me before.” His eyes were on the past. “ ‘Stay close to me,’ he’d say when I came around every day. He’d put his big old hand on my wrist. ‘We might have to confer.’ He always wanted to hear what I had to say.” He looked back to the front of the room, where Mr. Fagin had now gently turned the three women from the casket and was gently herding them toward the door. I saw him glance at me. The ladies would need their coats. I had my midshipman to meet at ten.

“And you were a good friend to him, Walter,” I said. It was my consoling angel’s voice. I could not have said myself if it was sincere.

His eyes dropped to my face once more, and then to my chest, unfocused and indifferent. “We both got a raw deal,” he said, and for a fraction of a second I thought he was talking about the two of us. I thought he was apologizing. But then he added, “Me and Bill.”

I was grateful for a moment to be compelled to say, “Excuse me.” I met the three women at the door and in the vestibule helped Mrs. Corrigan into her coat. Mr. Fagin had arranged for one of the assistants to take all them back to Greenpoint (Greenpernt, as he said it) every evening since the Corrigan apartment had been damaged slightly by the fire and more thoroughly by the fire hoses. Mr. Fagin and I both escorted her to the car waiting in the street, and when he went ahead to open the car door, I felt the full weight of her as she leaned on my arm. I recalled how she had walked her son, her boy, down the steps every morning on the way to his kitchen chair, his hand tucked in the crook of her arm the way a bride holds the arm of a groom. I thought again of the effort it must have taken her to deliver him there every morning in his pressed shirt and his brushed suit.

When the car pulled away from the curb, I turned back. Walter Harnett was at the foot of the stoop now, his hat in his hand. Mr. Fagin bid him good night, glanced over his shoulder at me, and then went inside. I said, when Walter approached, “I’m sorry, Walter,” in my professional way. He looked down at me. He seemed to have gathered himself together, there was something of the old swagger and charm, despite the red-rimmed eyes. He had taken a remembrance card. I could see the edge of it in his breast pocket. “They oughta bury him with that chair,” he said, smiling again. “Remember that chair he sat in every day?”

I nodded. “I was just thinking about it.” It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past. “It’s still there,” I added, as if this should amaze him. “At least it was there this morning. No one’s had the heart to take it in.”

He swayed a little. “No fooling?” he said, and then “Jeez.” He surveyed the street scene above my head, but without interest. “I never come here anymore,” he said. “I moved my mother up to the Bronx, closer to us.”

And I was surprised to discover there was a knife edge to it, the “us.”

“I think I heard that,” I said, and moved closer to Fagin’s door. “I think my mother mentioned it.”

“Bronx’s much nicer.” He was slurring his words. He touched the remembrance card, or perhaps it was the flask underneath. “I wouldn’t wish this neighborhood on a dog.”

I put out my hand. I had learned something about moving people around from Mr. Fagin. “Good night, Walter,” I said. He looked at my outstretched hand, but didn’t take it. “I was 4F, you know,” he said. “The gimp.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I wanted to join up,” he said. “More than anything.”

“Sure,” I said again, and lowered my hand.

“Marines.”

I nodded. I imagined him as some kind of aide de camp, conferring with Patton or MacArthur, his hands held behind his back. “My brother’s army air force,” I told him. “Over in England.”

Walter shifted unsteadily. The odor of cigarettes and alcohol seemed to be woven into the fabric of his suit. It was a charm to me still, alcohol on a man’s breath. “Army air force is pansies,” Walter said. “Give me the marines.”

I shrugged. I was aware of the difference between what Walter Hartnett had become in my recollection and how he seemed to me now, in the flesh, heavier than he had been, with all his sharp sophistication worn down to a sad childishness. It was a kind of madness, to be charmed by him still. “Long as he’s safe,” I said. “That’s all I care about.”

Walter peered down at me, maybe a little distrustful now. “Do you want to get a drink?” he asked. “Are you through working?” It occurred to me then that he had not been surprised to find me in Fagin’s parlor, that he had known, somehow, before he came, that I worked here. Perhaps his mother, too, had kept him informed.

I shook my head. “I’ve got to meet someone,” I told him. I saw him glance again at my chest, squinting a bit now, as if to decipher the names of the boys who had been inside my bra since his last visit. “A boyfriend?” he asked, and when I only shrugged, he swayed a bit and said, “I get it.”

Standing with him between the streetlight and the light cast by Fagin’s door, I recognized that there was an opportunity here—opportunity for recompense—pain for pain. Opportunity to say, “A midshipmen, in fact, an able-bodied seaman,” and wouldn’t that have given Walter Hartnett what for?

But Walter Hartnett had loved blind Bill Corrigan since he was a lonely little boy, conferring with him on the sidewalk beside his kitchen chair. Walter and Bill: blind you, gimpy me. It was Walter who said, “Naa, Bill, not her,” when even Gabe had failed to be kind. Walter who had come here tonight—perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind—come down from the Bronx to weep like a child before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan’s passing.

I held out my hand again—“It was nice seeing you, Walter”—and this time he took it. I said, “Let’s both keep poor Bill in our prayers,” because if Walter Hartnett hadn’t loved me, he had surely loved Bill Corrigan, and loving Bill Corrigan had now broken his heart.

He shook his head. “More like him praying for us,” he said. “Bill’s retired from the game.”

I saw him grope for his breast pocket again as he walked away under the streetlights, weaving a bit. But it wasn’t the flask, it was the remembrance card he was after. Just before he rounded the corner, I saw how the light caught it, cupped in the palm of his hand.

Of the fifteen or so patients in the waiting room, not one of them sat alone. I mentioned this to my daughter, who looked up from her magazine, looked around, and said, “That’s true.”

“That’s nice,” I said. It was the eye surgeon’s office. It was the morning he “did cataracts.”

“They require that you bring someone to help you home,” Susan said. “It was in the instructions he gave you.”

“I suppose you could always take a cab if you were on your own,” I whispered. Five years widowed, eight without Gabe, thirty without my mother in the world, and sixty-some-odd (sixty-six, could it be?) since my father was gone, and although I had four good grown children to depend on, I sometimes felt I negotiated this time of my life as if from a high, precarious place. For every kindness my children bestowed, every lift to the doctor’s, every errand run or holiday dinner shared, I found myself imagining how I might manage if they weren’t there, couldn’t come, were otherwise engaged.

“No,” Susan said softly. “The paper said you had to bring someone to escort you home. Another person,” she added.

I paused. “I guess you could call an escort service, if you didn’t have someone,” I said, and when my daughter impatiently dropped the magazine to her lap, I quickly added, “I’m kidding.”

Susan raised the magazine again. “Relax,” she said, kindly enough, but meaning, I knew, stop talking. Susan had had a rough morning with her children, or so she’d told me when she came to the house, and was not looking forward to going into work when my surgery was over. The whole firm was on edge, a huge case, a court date approaching. And now the doctor was running behind.

The patients around us were middle-aged and older, the middle-aged ones sitting mostly side by side with their peers—spouses or friends—the older ones, every one of them, with younger escorts. Children, no doubt, although the oldest woman in the room was with a black girl, Jamaican from the sound of her voice, a nurse or an aide. Hired. There you go, I thought. An escort. But said nothing.

The doctor came out in his pale-blue scrubs, all the little strings of his outfit, the ones that tied the cap to his head, the ones that held the mask he had dropped around his neck, the ones that swung from his drawstring pants—which I always felt were undignified for a professional man—trailing as if he were caught in a breeze. Or running, perhaps, as no doubt he was, since he was running behind and the office was filled with patient patients and their ready eyes.

He approached one of the two women sitting alone on opposite sides of the room. “Mrs. Something or other’s daughter?” I didn’t catch the name. The woman, in a blue dress and a suntan, attractive, sat up anxiously, but said, “No.” He went to the other, who was somewhat heavyset and already on the edge of her chair. “Here I am,” she said as he approached her. “Mrs. Something or other’s daughter?” he asked again. And she said, “Yes.”

“It went very well,” the doctor said. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a bit. Say, twenty minutes more. And then she’ll be ready for you to take her home.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

The doctor went back through the door from which he’d come, and another door opened in the far wall and another name was called. A man this time, maybe about sixty, leaving his spouse or sister or friend behind with only a pat of the hand. Just prep right now, in fact, as the smiling nurse told him.

Not half an hour later, the doctor’s door opened again and the doctor came out, trailing his strings. He went to the attractive woman in the blue dress and asked, as if he had never seen or spoken to her before, “Mrs. So-and-so’s daughter?” and this time she said yes.

“It went very well,” the doctor said. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a bit. Say, twenty minutes. And then she’ll be ready for you to take home.”

He left, the nurse’s door opened again and another name was called. The old lady with the Jamaican nurse. “Just prep,” the nurse said kindly as the lady made her way through the door.

Twenty-five minutes by the clock and the doctor returned once more. “Mrs. Holybody?” or some such or other—he garbled the names—he said to the man’s wife, with only a brief, wary glance at the black girl, who was the only other person sitting alone. “Yes,” the wife said.

“It went very well. He’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor him for a while. Say, twenty minutes. And then he’ll be ready for you to take home.”

He left. The nurse’s door opened again. By now Susan had once more dropped her magazine to her lap. I looked to her and said, “My head’s beginning to spin.” Susan said, “At least he’s consistent.”

And another daughter, whose mother was just going in (“For prep,” said the smiling nurse), looked at us both and shook her head. “It’s almost unbelievable,” she whispered.

By now the finished products, wearing plastic sun shades, were beginning to emerge from yet another door, their escorts rising to meet them with a muffled kind of joy. I was reminded of what I had observed at the airport last month, waiting for my son in the pickup lane, after my visit to Gerty in Florida: the cars would swoop into the curb and the waiting friend or relative would raise a hand from the suitcase, there would be smiles all around, an embrace, an exuberant shaking of hands, a particular kind of elation, not, I was certain, because of the reunion alone—certainly all these New Yorkers couldn’t be so fond of one another—but because of all that had been negotiated safely: the takeoff, the landing, the coordinated meeting place, the drive to the airport, because every risk had been run, every anticipated crisis had been averted, and thus something celebratory and delightful about each ordinary reunion. Something, I thought, recalling Mr. Fagin, of the resurrection and the life all about this particular bit of LaGuardia. Even Tommy, I noticed, my oldest, who had never been very demonstrative, thumped me on the back in his large embrace before he lifted my suitcase from the curb.

“Everything went very well,” I heard the doctor saying over my shoulder. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a little more. Twenty minutes and she’ll be ready for you to take her home.”

And then the “just prep” nurse called my name.

When my own ordeal was over, Susan rose to meet me. Less exuberant, I thought, than some of the others had been, perhaps because she was now so late to work. But in the elevator Susan said, “He knew about your detached retina, right, from back when? You told him, didn’t you?” I said, “Of course,” but I found myself slowly putting my hand to my left cheek. I recalled now that it was the cataract in the right eye he was supposed to remove. I saw my daughter raise her chin and pinch her nostrils, once, twice, although there was nothing to smell but the carpet and the bland air of the medical tower elevator. It was precisely as my mother used to do. “ ‘Cause he didn’t say everything went very well,” Susan said. I could hear her revving up her attorney voice. “He said there was scar tissue. From a previous surgery. Like it was a big surprise. He said you’ll probably need a corneal transplant, if you don’t want to lose that eye.”

In the car, Susan said again, “You told him you had that surgery, back when?”

“Of course,” I told her. “They took a full history.” I had begun to feel responsible, nevertheless, for the doctor’s mistake. Easy enough conclusion to reach when you were an old woman living on your own. Living on a ledge of this high precarious place. Perhaps I had confused left and right, as I had done so often as a child.

Susan banged the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Fuck,” she said. “He did the wrong eye.”

I had long ago stopped reprimanding my children for their language—quoting Mrs. Fagin with my finger raised. The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Susan said, “I told you we should have gone into the city for this. These suburban doctors are money crazed. You saw how he ran the place. Like a factory.”

“I’ll have a transplant, then,” I said casually. Knowing I wouldn’t. A cornea peeled off a corpse, after all the corpses I’d seen? Not likely.

“We should take him to court,” my daughter said. “Sue him for malpractice.”

I said, “What’s done is done.”

But Susan pushed on. “I’m serious,” she said. “He clearly fucked up. And now we’ll have to find another doctor—we’re going into the city this time—and you’ll have to go through another surgery. And I’ll have to take more time off from work.” As if each item implied equal effort on all parts. “There are damages here. Seriously, we should sue.”

I was thinking of the high, precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no. I was recalling myself in that ancient city hospital with my eyes bound in tape, calling into an empty room. Not empty, though, not that time.

We were pulling into the driveway. It had been years since we had gotten rid of the carport, and yet I realized I had been anticipating getting out of the car under its shade. Easier on my eyes.

“What do you think?” Susan asked.

I was thinking of the years that had passed since we’d taken down that old carport, and how foolish I’d been to have forgotten, or confused, the time I now lived in. A notion better kept to myself. I told her, “My brother sometimes said, ‘A fool’s thoughts are in his mouth.’ I think it was from the Bible.”

“Jesus, Mom,” Susan muttered. “Don’t quote me Uncle Gabe blade, tell me what you want to do.” There was the slap and then the sharp echoing pain. A sudden stillness in the car. I had heard my children use the phrase before, joking between themselves. I knew they meant no harm. It was how they looked at the world. “Sorry,” my daughter said brusquely. “But I’m serious. What just happened to you is very wrong. How much longer do you think you’ll be able to live alone here if you lose an eye. It could start you on a real decline.” I felt her hand against my own. “I just think someone should be made to pay for all the inconvenience you’ll be put through. I seriously think you should seek some consolation.”

I shook my head against her earnestness. There was something of my brother in her certainty about the way the world should run. “Nonsense,” I told her. And tried to laugh. “I don’t need consolation.”

I heard her sigh with false patience. “Compensation!”—shouting it. “I think you should seek some compensation. For pain and suffering.”

I laughed again, sincerely this time. “Not much chance of that,” I told her. “Not in this life.”

Inside, she fixed me a cup of tea and a hastily arranged ham sandwich. I settled on the couch in the sunroom with a blanket and a pillow. My daughter kissed the top of my head. “You’ll be all right?” Of course, I understood it wasn’t an honest answer she was looking for.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You’d better run.”

“Helen will be by this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll stop by in the morning.”

“You are good girls,” I told her.

I closed my eyes. I was aware of my daughter’s broad frame standing over me. She wore a dark business suit. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, about Uncle Gabe,” she said, but then added with a laugh, “We’re all pretty sure he was gay.”

I had heard these discussions before among my children. There was a lightness to them, a buoyant interest, as if they were talking about a character on TV. I put my wrist over my eyes to show her I was tired.

I said, “I don’t see the world the way you kids do.”

Susan said, turning away, “Sometimes you don’t see it at all,” getting the last word. I had to laugh at that. She was my daughter.

“Is it you again?” the young man said, bowing a bit before he took the chair beside me. “I think we met before. I knew your brother.”

But my glasses were in my purse, and even if I’d had them on, I would not have made the connection between this thin blur of a young man and the chubby, florid guy who—he said now—could have bitten his tongue when he once again called my brother “Father,” even after Gabe had so politely explained that this was no longer the case. On Court Street, before the war.

“Would it be impolite of me to ask what happened?” he said. “Why he left? He seemed like a good priest. He always gave a good sermon.”

“Well, yes, it would,” I said, and then relented, because he had, after all, crossed the room—a crowded hotel party, a homecoming for some boy I barely knew, the friend of a friend of Gerty’s—just to sit beside me. “It wasn’t for him,” I said. And then, relenting further, “He once said it was because they threatened to throw him out of the seminary for smoking. He said after that he couldn’t light up without questioning his vocation.”

He had a round, gullible face. “No kidding.”

I waved my hand. I decided I might as well put my glasses on. I had no interest in someone with so little sense of humor.

“Just joking,” I said, and took them from my purse. On occasion I had heard my mother say to those who persisted that Gabe had come home to take care of his mother, after our father died, What else could a loving son do? But I was not inclined to risk foolish tears, mentioning such a thing to this slip of a stranger.

Seen clearly, he was indeed thin, his collar didn’t touch his neck, and as a result the knot of his tie seemed somehow unanchored. I had the impression that inside his clothes his flesh was a good inch or so away from the fabric. There were shadows in his cheeks that I had at first attributed to my eyesight, but that I could see now were actual and his own. Even the cuffs of his suit jacket and his shirt seemed too large for him. His hands beneath them were childishly pale.

“Did you just get home?” I asked, relenting again. I was beginning to recognize the look of a GI who’d had a tough time in the war.

“A while ago,” he said, and pulled his lips down in a clownish frown. Then he raised his hand and passed it in front of his face—the comic routine—and he was grinning at me. He had lovely small white teeth.

“Where were you stationed?” I asked, but he shook his head with a brief, Bogey grimace and asked instead, “What’s your brother up to now?”

I told him he was home with us, back at his old job, thinking about college.

“Married?” he asked, and when I said, “Not yet,” he nodded as if he understood something I might not. “Once a priest, always a priest,” he said, with more wisdom than I was willing to allow him.

I swatted my hand to brush the platitude away. “Oh, he’s got a string of girlfriends,” I said, and saw by the way he dropped his eyes to the drink in his hand that I had embarrassed him.

He bowed his head to sip from his glass. There was the awkwardness of a halting conversation with a stranger in a crowded room—would it continue or would one of us soon turn away? Gerty and the two other girls I had come with were somewhere in the crowd. Were he to turn away, I would be left sitting alone.

“And what about you?” I asked him, mostly because I did not want to end up sitting here alone, but also because there was the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who so clearly had had a tough time in the war.

He held up his hands and said, “No strings of girlfriends here.” The blush was visible even beneath his thinning hair.

Which made me blush in turn. This was not going well. “I meant work,” I said. “Are you back to work?”

He nodded. “Back doing my patriotic duty,” he said, saluting, “brewing beer,” and with that the recollection stirred itself and I knew for certain what day it had been when my brother and I had met him on the street, late August, Court Street, before the war.

Later that same night I asked him, “How did you know me? After just one meeting, after all that while?”

I was giving him the opportunity to say, Oh, I knew you. I’ve remembered you across all these years. But he laughed and confessed he hadn’t known me at all. That he’d been sitting with a group across the room and one of the girls was filling everybody in on who was who—pointing her bouncing finger here and there around the room and finally coming to me. He made the connection with the young priest he’d once known, the priest he’d once run into on the street, no collar, no longer a priest at all. He asked and learned that yes, indeed, Gabe was my brother.

And then he had crossed the room to introduce himself: Tom Commeford, although I had not remembered the name.

We were at the foot of our stoop. He had taken me home from the hotel, and we had already agreed to see a movie together on my next night off. He’d laughed when I told him where I worked, because, he said—wasn’t it funny how things turn out—it was a wake at Fagin’s funeral parlor that had brought him to Court Street that hot afternoon in August, before the war.

Standing in the subway coming home, he had leaned toward my ear and said, “Aren’t we in the same profession more or less: biers and beers, stiffs and getting stiff, waking and going out like a light.” He might have gone on like that if I hadn’t lost my balance as the car shifted and grabbed his arm. He had patted my hand reassuringly.

He was thin, no more than an inch or two taller than I, balding and round-faced. He should have said, more gallantly, “Oh, I’ve remembered you all along.”

He lifted his hat with one hand as he put out the other to say, “I’m very glad to have met you,” there in the streetlight in front of our house. “To have met you again,” he added.

I took his hand and surprised myself by saying, “Would you like to come up? Gabe would love to see you.”

He shook his head. “Oh, he won’t remember me.”

I looked over my shoulder to see that the light was on in my brother’s bedroom. He would be reading. He hardly slept for all his reading. He had plans to go to college. “Gabe remembers everyone,” I said. “He has the knack.”

And he smiled at me with his beautiful teeth. “I’ll just say a quick hello.”

Climbing the stairs behind me, he said, jovially, “Your mother’s not Italian, is she?” And I paused at the first landing to look back at him. Under the brim of his fedora, his face was flushed. He seemed a little breathless. “I only know Italian girls named Marie,” he said, his hand on the banister, his voice trailing.

What the question revealed was that he had been thinking of my name as we climbed the stairs: not of the state of the apartment house, which was looking, I thought, a little shabby under the care of a new landlord, or the shape of my rump, or the lateness of the hour, or even of the possibility of a drink being offered once we got upstairs, but of me, my name. Four steps below me when we paused, he now doffed his hat, his face raised to mine, and it was the same sudden panic that had entered his eyes when, back on that summer day, he had misspoken again, called my brother Father again. “Was that a rude question?” he said softly, a history of his own social failings, or, perhaps, of his own failed offers of affection and friendship now in his voice. He shifted his feet. “I don’t have anything against Italians,” he said.

I couldn’t help but laugh. He smiled at me, still uncertain, still in the dark, but grateful to follow my lead. “It’s George M. Cohan,” I said.

He said, “Ah,” and nodded, as if he understood precisely what I meant, but the pretense lasted hardly a moment. His face fell again. He was, perhaps, incapable of deception. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“Don’t you know the song?” I asked him. It was as if all his uncertainty had given me permission to be assured. I hummed a little. “ ‘But with propriety, society will say Marie.’ The way my father told it, I was going to be Mary until my mother heard that line and decided society and propriety were really what she was after—’Blessed Virgin Mary, stand aside’—as my father said.”

And I made note, obliquely, that my voice did not catch, no foolish tears. I suddenly felt peculiarly happy, although the drinks at the party had been well watered. “So, no, not Italian,” I said, a little more kindly than before. I smiled down at this poor young guy, shrunken inside his clothes. “Just lace-curtain pretension,” I said. “Both my parents were Irish born.”

The delight, and the relief, on his face made me laugh again. “No kidding,” he said. “Mine, too. What a coincidence.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Some coincidence. Two New Yorkers with Irish parents.” And began to climb again.

“Not that I knew them,” he said from behind me. “My Irish parents. I’m a foundling-home kid, truth be told.”

Once more I paused on the stair to look at him. I wondered suddenly if it was childhood neglect that had shaped him, not the war at all. But he was smiling. “It’s not a sad tale,” he said. “I never knew them. My parents. They were actors. Vaudeville. My mother was a beauty with a voice like an angel. My father was a dancing man. They left me at a rooming house on Tenth Avenue and continued on their tour.”

“That’s awful,” I said, and he shook his head. “There were at least six other kids I knew growing up who had been told the same story. Vaudeville, voice like an angel, Tenth Avenue, and all. I think half the nuns who ran the place were former chorus girls.” He grinned.

“Were you never adopted?” I asked. There was the tug of sympathy, but also some wariness, I must admit. I had read far enough into David Copperfield by then to know a hard-luck childhood could portend a hard-luck life.

“We were only a few days from getting on a train, to be sent out West,” he said. “Me and some buddies. I was nearly ten. I might have ended up some kind of farmer in the Wild West—can you imagine me in a ten-gallon hat?—but Sister Saviour—now there’s a name—held me back. She had a widowed sister in East New York who had just lost a son, older than me, her only child. A teenager. Poor kid drowned out in Rockaway. So I went out and lived with her. She had a very nice place. Very clean.” He grinned again.

“That couldn’t have been easy,” I said. Standing above him just those few steps made me feel taller and wiser. Even in the ugly light of the stairway, he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child’s.

He shook his head. “She was a very nice lady. Very refined. God rest her soul. I got no complaints there.”

We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit—the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more likely his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.

At the door of the apartment he said, “I’ll just have a few words and be on my way. I won’t wear out my welcome.” He said, as I opened the door, “Just a quick hello.”

But he was not, I was learning, a man of a single word—of any single word. I placed him on the couch in the living room and walked quietly through the darkened bedroom where my mother was asleep. I knocked on Gabe’s door and whispered Tom Commeford’s name. He looked up from his book and frowned. “One of the brewery guys,” I said.

When Gabe walked out into the light of the living room, it was clear that he did indeed remember the man. “What do you know,” he said, pointing at him, then offering his hand.

“Small world,” Tom said, and swept his hand across the air, as if to indicate the narrow room itself. “After all these years.”

I told them both to sit at the table while I put the kettle on. And it was the smell of the toast I thought to make for them, burning under the broiler, that brought my mother out of the bedroom in her robe and her long braid, and gave Gabe the opportunity to tell Tom, “My sister’s helpless in the kitchen. Fair warning.”

It was a kind of party, then: the three of us at the dining-room table while my mother made tea and toast and—“Well, yes, thank you, if it’s not too much trouble”—fried some eggs and some slices of ham, as if she recognized, too, in the first moments of their introduction, how little substance this stranger had under his suit.

She placed it all on a warmed platter, eggs, ham, toast, while I set the table.

The two men compared their years in the war. They had both been in England, at two different air bases, although Tom had flown, Gabe had not. There was much back and forth between the two of them as my mother and I listened. Tom had been a radio operator, he said, and with a mouth full of toast and egg, he casually revealed that he’d spent seven months in a German POW camp near the Baltic. He shrugged, glanced at me apologetically when I said, “My goodness.” The food there didn’t much agree with him, he said—you’d never catch him eating another rutabaga—but the company was good. He smiled at us with his small teeth. “Roll call twice a day, but after that, not much to do. Terrible boredom.”

He painted pictures there, he told us. A way to pass the time. A Red Cross package had arrived with watercolors. One guy was talented. He gave the others lessons. Only Tom stuck with them. Everything he drew was lopsided somehow, but he liked doing it.

Suddenly he reached into his suit jacket and extracted a small tobacco tin. He pressed it against his tie as he pried it open, his hands pale and childish, except for a silver pinky ring, which told me there was some vanity here. There was only a thickly folded piece of paper inside the tin. He took it out and opened it up, smoothing it out on the white tablecloth before passing it across the table to me. All three of us leaned forward to see. “That’s the barracks,” he said softly, apologetically. “Not very good,” he offered.

It was a cartoon, drawn in smudged pencil. It showed the various bunks, a prisoner lying in each, looking, each one of them, bored and idle, and yet, in each, some personality was displayed. There was a prisoner with his hands behind his head, elbows raised, looking at the ceiling. Another on his side, frowning at the book before him (a single German word, Nein, upside down on its cover), one with his knees raised and his mouth opened, a trail of zzzz’s, another asleep on his stomach, his backside in the air. There was a window that showed black slashes of rain and, through them, a distant guard tower, a fence. There were scraps of paper on the wall behind the bunks—intimations of pinups and calendars and days crossed off. There were only touches of color, a wash of pale yellow from the single lamp that hung from the ceiling, hints of khaki and brown and blue in the soldier’s clothing, a dash of red that was a woman’s dress in the tiny drawing on the wall, its edges curling.

The three of us laughed softly—it seemed called for, given the Sad Sack details, the bulbous noses, and the zzzz’s, and the prisoner with his rump in the air. Tom laughed, too. “No da Vinci here,” he said, looking fondly at his own work. “But this is more or less the way it looked to me, if I squinted enough.”

“It’s very good,” I said, although it was indeed lopsided and amateurish, with strange proportions. “You could draw for the Sunday funnies.”

My mother said, “I like how you can see through the window.”

Smiling, blushing, Tom carefully folded the drawing along its well-worn creases and returned it to the tin. No, he wasn’t very good, he said. The guy who gave the lessons, a Southerner, was the real artist among them.

He then went on—he was a man who loved to talk—to describe the clever ways they had come up with to expand their little cache of Red Cross watercolors: boiling or mixing things, pollen and leaves, coal dust from the stove, a little ink when he could get it, beet juice, spitting into their palms to dilute some mud, some clay.

He looked up and smiled and laughed a little. “Funny enough,” he said softly, and then paused as if uncertain about going on. “Funny thing is,” he said, “I was doing exactly that one time, spitting into some clay”—he pantomimed, holding out one cupped palm, circling it with the index finger of the other, stirring—“when I thought about something from the Gospels, actually something that I think you said, Gabe,” I heard the caught and swallowed “Father.” “In a sermon, way back when.”

The man’s poor face gave everything away: he was embarrassed by where his own talk had led him, and yet driven—as if by some sudden inspiration—to go on with what he had to say.

“Shows you,” he said to me, “what a small world it is.” And then added, dissatisfied with the cliché, “Shows you nothing’s really arbitrary in this life.” He pulled himself up, leaned over the table a bit. “Anyway, here’s the thing.” He began the pantomime again. “I’m mixing up some paint and a little bit of clay, diluting it, and I spit into my palm, and I suddenly remember something you said, Gabe, about the blind man, in a sermon. Back when.” And he glanced at my brother somewhat warily.

I said, “Bill Corrigan.” I indicated the front window. “The guy across the street. He used to sit outside. His mother dressed him in a suit every day. He was blinded in the First World War. Or mostly blind. The kids used to have him call their games.”

“A blind umpire,” Gabe added.

“Gone now,” my mother said.

I said to Tom, “He killed himself during the war. Poor guy. Turned on the gas.” I pointed toward our own kitchen. “It shocked us all.” I was beginning to remember how Gabe had told me once that he’d tried to use Bill Corrigan in a sermon.

My mother said, “He had a devoted mother.”

But Tom looked at us both, shaking his head. “That’s a shame,” he said, polite and deferential, but also frowning, determined not to be diverted. “But I’m afraid I’m referring to something else. Not about Brooklyn, per se,” he added, somewhat nonsensically, but conveying anyway that he was attempting to be both intelligent and sincere. “A story from the gospels. Jesus picking up some clay and spitting into it. Putting it on the blind man’s eyes.” He looked to Gabe. “Do you remember what you said? We had a conversation about it, you and I, after Mass. We had a bite of lunch together.”

Gabe’s shirt collar was opened, and a deep flush had risen up from under it, up over his throat. The tips of his ears, too, had turned red.

“Nothing very original, I’m afraid,” Gabe said softly.

But Tom was shaking his head again. “No, no, no,” he said, so earnestly that my mother and I were silenced. Tom looked at us both, still smiling, although that hopeless uncertainty once again crossed his face. He was a guy at the mercy of his own impulse to keep talking. “You put it very well. Very profound.” He touched his balding dome as if to call forth the recollection. Seemed disappointed that he could not. “I’ll butcher it if I try to say it myself.” He screwed up his mouth, drew back in his chair. “You don’t remember?”

I looked to Gabe, hoping he would be kind. Surely it would take an effort of will not to be kind to this poor guy floundering in his own sincerity. Gabe reached out to touch the cup and saucer on the table before him.

“I probably mentioned the whole profession of faith idea,” Gabe said, relenting. “There’s really no one else in the New Testament who Jesus cures without being asked. Without a profession of faith. I always found that interesting.”

“The guy was just sitting there,” Tom added happily. “Am I right?”

Gabe nodded, generous in his small smile. “That’s right. John, chapter nine. Jesus and his disciples were having a discussion, it seems, about human suffering being a punishment for sin. The disciples pointed to the blind man begging. This man was born blind, they said, was it because his parents sinned? It was the belief in those days,” he added, young scholar, “that blindness or deformity was a punishment for the parents’ sins.”

“Grateful to be an orphan,” Tom said suddenly, and looked at my mother and me, smiling. “Or maybe that means I’m in more trouble than most.”

“Well, we’re all sinners,” Gabe said. “But the point is, no one was asking Jesus to cure the man, they were just using him to illustrate their question. And yet, Our Lord, out of compassion alone, it seems to me, approaches the man, picks up some dirt—“ He paused, ducking his head with a wry smile. “We all know the story.”

“Right,” Tom cried. He sat forward, even briefly lifted himself out of his chair. Then he looked at me and said, “There you go,” as if his point had been made. “That’s just what I was doing, fooling around with some paint”—once again he pantomimed the action, circling his finger on the palm of his hand—“a little dirt, a little spit.” He looked to my mother. “Beg your pardon,” he said. And then added, “Saliva,” correcting himself. He seemed utterly delighted by yet another connection being made, between that lonely time in the prison camp and this homely one here at our dining-room table, between Gabe’s words and his own. He looked into his palm. “And I thought about what you said, how the guy’s just sitting there, not asking, not wearing himself out with asking, you said, and, bingo, Jesus cures him. Just because he feels sorry for the guy. We had lunch together. We talked about it.” He looked up. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “It was a good thing to remember, over there. That you didn’t necessarily have to ask. Or even believe. It gave me hope.”

We were silent for a moment, and I could see reflected in his face the uncertainty with which the three of us had received his tale.

“And I don’t mean Bob Hope,” he said suddenly, as if this had been his hidden punch line all along.

We laughed, and he brushed his hands together, ridding them of the imagined earth and paint and saliva. “So that’s my war story,” he said with a grin.

“And how did you come to be there?” Gabe asked him. “In the camp?” He said it softly, as if he were speaking to a penitent. His own time on the army air force base in England had been, as far as my mother and I could tell, a triumph. He’d been promoted twice. A glorified paper pusher was how he put it when he returned, all modesty.

Tom shifted in the chair, glanced at me, and smiled. “Jerry caught us on a return run,” he said lightly. “Battered us but good. We had to bail.” He made a stage grimace. He might well have had some vaudeville in his blood. “That’s when I figured I was done for.”

His parachute training, he said, had been short and perfunctory, and after a few easy missions, he’d stopped even imagining himself jumping out of a plane. When the order came, the plane shuddering—like a subway car going over cobblestones, if you can imagine it, he said—he was pretty sure he couldn’t do it. He gripped the door. He seriously considered just hanging on. Going down with the ship. But then he felt a push from behind, and then he dropped into the worst nightmare anybody ever had: cloud, smoke, the thick smell of the fuel. A dream’s endless falling.

He laughed telling it, as if it were a joke and the joke was on him. Through the years, he would always tell it this way. It was the way even our children retold it.

He said he remembered only after he had pulled the parachute cord—touching his forehead in a comic gesture of despair—that he was supposed to count to ten before he pulled it. And then he counted anyway, a second too late, foolishly, all apologetic, as if he thought that if he counted with enough sincerity, the parachute wouldn’t notice he was counting too late. And then he counted again. All the way down, he kept counting to ten. He surprised himself, he said, thinking back on it. He surprised himself that he kept counting like that, going down, when what he should have been doing was saying his prayers.

And then out of the noise of the worst and loudest sound he had ever heard and hoped never to hear again he fell into dead silence. Nothing at all, he said—and held out his hands and made his eyes wide to replicate his astonishment.

So suddenly quiet that he thought his ears were blown out for good. He saw the air was now blue and there was a serene patchwork world beneath him. Even children running across a churchyard, into a field, and he thought—“I kid you not,” he said in his the-joke’s-on-me way—“Now, this isn’t so bad. I could get used to this.”

He was floating peacefully; there was some sunshine. The children with their open mouths were like a voiceless chorus beneath him. The terror had vanished, so too the bitter trembling. He thought, he said, “This might be even better than living.”

The children were the first to reach him when he fell, tumbling back to the hard earth, busting up his shoulder, breaking his wrist.

“But those kids,” he said, “that was the luck of the Irish, it turned out.” And he gave a kind of salute to my mother, as if she had arranged things.

Because, he said, the next thing he knew, a mad old Kraut was pointing a Luger at his head, so close that he could smell the hot metal, as if it had just been fired. “He was in a tizzy,” Tom said. “Mad as hell,” and he apologized to my mother again for his language. “I couldn’t understand anything he said but Kinder, waving the goddamn gun”—he apologized again—“and telling me, I guess, that he’d like to blow my brains out except for the kids who were there, all around us. He even tried to chase them away, but they were having too much fun, throwing little handfuls of mud in my direction, yelling their heads off. So much excitement. You know how kids are.” He laughed and touched his fingers to the teacup. “The crazy old Kraut had enough decency not to want to shoot me in front of them.”

My mother put her hands to her lips and said, “Glory be.”

Tom gave a self-deprecating wave of his hand. “Well,” he said, “to make a long story short, a German officer showed up—officer, hell, he looked all of eighteen, like a choirboy—and gave the old man Hail Columbia in German, and then told me in English, in so many words, to get out of the harness and follow him—mach schnell—if I wanted to live. It took me a few minutes to get it. I thought I was already dead.”

He laughed again, his face flushed under the light of the chandelier. He was enjoying our attention. He was a man who loved to talk.

“This fellow grabbed me under the arm. I was still wobbly kneed, shaking like a leaf, but he got me the hell out of there. He told me the old man was crazy, crazy with grief. He’d learned just the day before that his son, his only child, a German airman, had been killed by the Allies. So he was out for revenge. He would have put a bullet in my head if those kids hadn’t been there.”

“An eye for an eye,” Gabe said.

Tom sat forward. He shook his head. “But here’s the thing,” he said. He was smiling oddly, with less mirth than before. “Here’s the way I looked at it. And believe me, I had plenty of time to look at it. If the old guy had shot me, then and there, it wouldn’t have been the same. It wouldn’t have been equal.”

He turned to my mother, as if she alone needed an explanation. “I was an orphan, you see,” he told her. “A foundling-home kid. I had no father to grieve for me.” He looked to Gabe again. “So it wouldn’t have evened out, if he’d shot me right then and there. There would have been no counterpart, no American counterpart, so to speak, to match that poor old Kraut and his grief. There still would have been more pain on his side of it. The pain of a father losing a child. There wouldn’t have been any pain like that on my side, since I had no father. So it wouldn’t have been equal.”

Suddenly he lifted his eyes to the chandelier above the table, and I was both embarrassed and dismayed to see the light there reflect a sudden tear. I saw his throat move as he swallowed with some difficulty. There was, I thought, something unmanly about all this, not just the sudden emotion, but the stream of talk. I was used to more reticence at this table. And yet, there was also the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who had been through so much.

There was an awkward silence—even with all my expertise I struggled to find a word of comfort. And then Gabe said softly, “We’re all of equal value in the eyes of God.”

Tom turned to him with some admiration. I was relieved to see that the tear in his eye hadn’t fallen. He brushed it away with his knuckle. “Well, that’s a nicer way to think of it,” he said. He said, “That’s a good point to consider,” and smiled again before he added, “But that don’t mean some of us won’t leave this world without anyone much taking notice.”

The platter at the center of the table was empty, and I stood to gather the plates. With some intention, I touched my hip to Tom’s arm as I leaned to reach his. He turned his head a bit, smiling, his ear somewhere in the vicinity of my breast and my heart. There was the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who had known such loneliness.

I took a few minutes in the kitchen, rinsing the plates, refilling the kettle, resisting something I couldn’t define. I heard my mother telling him, “Only these two. But my husband used to say we’ve run the gamut, seeing how different they were. Different as night and day.”

When I returned to the table with another pot of tea, Gabe was saying, “Amadan was what she called me when she was a kid. Fool. Although the Bible has it that whoever calls his brother a fool will be subject to fiery Gehenna.”

Tom stood as I came in, held out my chair. He was laughing again. “Gehenna, no less,” he said, relishing the old family story of how I had squelched Gabe’s boyish piety with Mrs. Chehab’s leftover Irish. “You’re in for it, Marie,” he said, relishing, perhaps, my name.

My mother put her hands to the table and slowly rose. Tom stood, moved to help her with her chair. She touched him gently on the arm, although she was never one to go about touching strangers. “I’ll leave it to you, Tom,” she said, “to stand between these two. I’m going back to bed.”

So I had my wedding in the pretty church, after all.

Squinting at myself in the narrow bathroom mirror, lovely in my makeup and my veil, I confess to recalling another time: How’s that, Mr. Hartnett, I thought, making eyes at my own reflection. Mr. Walter Hartnett.

Gabe walked me down the aisle and surprised me at the last minute by not merely kissing my cheek when we reached Tom but pulling me into a firm embrace. We all joked about it later, at the reception. “Like he was sending you off to the Foreign Legion,” Tom said. Gabe laughed quietly. Admitted, blushing, that he might have been a little overcome, there was so much to think about on such a day. “I am the fool of loss,” he said.

“You haven’t lost a sister,” Tom told him. “You’ve gained me. God help you.”

That night, Tom lifted the blanket and I closed my eyes completely, even though the light in the hotel room was already dim, only a thin shaft from along the bathroom door and the low glow of streetlight behind the thick curtains. “There’s not much to you, is there?” he said.

I was on my back, my hands folded together over my chest so that I was aware of both the new wedding ring on one and the feel of my own heartbeat beneath the other. I wore the white nightgown, satin and lace, that my mother had sewn. It was the centerpiece of my trousseau, and the provocative way my mother had worked the lovely lace into its bodice had come as some surprise to me. My mother, it seemed, knew things she had never spoken of.

“Take it or leave it,” I told Tom with a laugh. I was dizzy with the champagne we had drunk.

And Tom said, “Oh, I’ll take it. If I may.”

There was the stirring touch of alcohol on his breath. The taste of champagne and sweet cake at the back of my throat. The faint, lingering scent of bleach on the hotel’s sheets and pillowcases. And it was either an indication of some expertise I didn’t know he had, or of my mother’s skill with fabric and needle and thread, that I was out of the lovely gown without the slightest effort on my part, without even opening my eyes.

I was naïve enough, drunk enough, to be surprised to find that a body could become a new thing altogether, shed of its clothes. Just as I was surprised to discover, not then, of course, but over time, that in the dark it would all remain unchanged—skin, hair, and limb, bone and blubber, scent and heartbeat and rhythm of breath. Unchanged as far as mouth was concerned, lips were concerned. A mystery revealed only to the long married.

In the morning, in the pale hotel room, what a lot of strangeness. I reached for my glasses to see the time. Just after 7:00 a.m. There was a brown-edged cigarette burn in the wood of the nightstand that I associated somehow with the narrow headache that was searing the center of my brain. My mouth was as dry as ash. Experience told me I would not go back to sleep. Whatever charm the room had had last night, with its low light and drawn shades and elegant silver bucket of champagne, hadn’t exactly fled—I had never before, after all, spent a night in a place anything like the St. George Hotel—but there was a weirdness about it all at this hour of the morning—the light behind the pale green curtains and the rattling of the dark radiator, a door slamming somewhere, the revving of motors in the street, a disappointing sense of an ordinary day, even here in the lovely hotel, an ordinary day simply going on. Tom, this stranger, with his thin hair curled like a Coney Island Kewpie doll’s above his pink face, was serenely asleep beside me.

I found my nightgown on the floor, slipped into it—hardly a wrinkle, I was happy to discover, good fabric, as my mother had said. The robe was on a chair in the corner. In the bathroom, I threw cold water on my face to relieve the headache. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, combed my hair, and put on a little lipstick. In the movies, there would be room service, a bellhop pushing a cloth-draped table into the room, ostrich feathers on my sleeves, but it was Sunday morning and we had to fast, since we were meeting my mother and Gabe for ten o’clock Mass. My mother would give us breakfast back home, with all the wedding party invited. There would be some quiet kidding, no doubt, Tom’s friends from the brewery especially. At the reception one of them had crooned, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed, we danced and we danced cause the room had no bed.” One had left a jar of Vaseline on the seat of the hired car when we left the reception—which Tom knocked to the floor and I pretended I didn’t see.

We were taking a train to a resort outside of Albany, a place Gerty had recommended that would prove to be less elegant than we had hoped.

With my head aching, I recalled something my father had once said, about someone not being the first groom to feel under the weather the morning after the big day. I figured I wasn’t the first bride to feel this way, either. And then I remembered it was Dora Ryan’s husband he had referred to. The woman pretending to be a man. I was grateful that I hadn’t thought of her before this, especially last night, as we slipped out of our clothes.

When I went back to the room, Tom was awake and looking at me with some concern. His hair still stood up above his bald scalp like a pale flame. “Are you all right?” he whispered as if I were some delicate thing, and although I was a little sore—I’ll admit I had wondered at one point if the Vaseline would have helped—I said, blasé, “Oh, I’m fine, thank you. And yourself?”

He said he suspected a glass of tomato juice with a shot of Worcestershire would help, after Mass. And I quoted my father to him, Not the first groom, after the big night.

He moved aside a bit, as if he needed to make room for me to get back into bed, and I climbed in beside him.

Strangely—here I was in my satin and lace nightgown and him in his undershirt, in bed together for the first time in our lives and talking as if we were fully clothed and sitting at my mother’s table drinking tea—we went over our plans for the day, Mass, breakfast, the subway to Grand Central, or should we splurge and take a cab? Why not? Our packed suitcases were at my mother’s—I said “my mother’s” purposefully, self-consciously, not “my house,” or even “home,” as if to remind myself of where I now belonged—even if it was only a small apartment in Rego Park that I had barely seen, that Tom had secured only two weeks earlier. I said “the old neighborhood,” although it had been my neighborhood just the day before.

Because she was on my mind, or perhaps because we were a married couple now and such subjects were no longer impolite, I told him the story of Dora Ryan’s travail, back in the old neighborhood: a woman pretending to be a man.

“More to be pitied,” Tom said. He in turn told me about a fellow he worked with, Darcy Furlong, from the South. “A nice guy,” he said, “but a window dresser, if you know what I mean.” Some of the other fellows had given him a hard time until the boss put a stop to it—the guy’s tormented enough, was the way the boss, Mr. Heep, had put it to Tom.

(At our reception, Mr. Fagin and Mr. Heep had stood before me, arm in arm, laughing and pointing at each other, shouting about what they called the “irony of it,” that they both had names out of Charles Dickens. I thought it only a meaningless happenstance, but Tom, who had learned his catechism from former chorus girls, saw every such coincidence as God’s winking reminder that He was a regular Ziegfeld, orchestrating everything. Tom raised his glass to the two men and said, “Beers and biers,” which got everybody roaring.)

“You’ve got to have some pity for them,” Tom said. “People like that. It’s got to be a lonely life.”

And we drew closer together, in our new and unaccustomed intimacy, under the hotel sheets that smelled faintly of bleach and now of our own sleep-warmed bodies.

For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain—this is how we saw the world—there would never again be loneliness in life. For Tom, as it turned out.

He shifted in the bed and put his arm around my waist, put his face to the satin and lace of my lap. There was the sound of water running in another room, another door closing somewhere nearby, and short voices in the hall. The ordinary, rushing world going on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.

I reminded him that we didn’t have much time, we had to get going if we were going to make it to Mass. His cheek against my bare arm was rough with the night’s stubble. The taste of champagne lingered on his breath. To hell with time, he said, and I marveled to discover that this was something we might also do in daylight.

The figure in the doorway was squarely built, broad-shouldered in his long white T-shirt and with a wide dark head, but not tall, and decidedly pitched to the right.

“Can’t you sleep, Marie?” he said.

“No,” I told him.

“Would you like some hot milk?” A smiling lilt to the words.

“No,” I said, resisting the charm of it.

I heard him sigh. Saw him tilt a little farther to his right, leaning, I supposed, against the door frame.

“Is there anything at all I can do for you?” he said. There was some golden light, hallway light, behind him. There was the lamplight from behind my chair that touched his white T-shirt. He had told me at some point that he’d found a cardboard box of them, size XXL, on the side of the Grand Central Parkway, and now he wore them every day to work, fresh and clean, a little too long, perhaps. He was not a tall man, but broad and strong, although somewhat misshapen. He had had scoliosis as a child. He had told me this, too. Like most of the workers here, caregivers they called themselves, he was from one of the Islands and spoke with a lilt that was often both beautiful and incomprehensible.

“I’m fine,” I said.

If you’re the caregiver, I sometimes said, am I the caretaker? But they didn’t understand the joke.

“Would you like to get back into bed?” he asked, and I lifted my hand. Sleep eluded me in the way so many things had begun to do: recollections, sounds, vision. I had grown weary of waiting for it. “No,” I said, “I’m better off in the chair.”

“I think you would be better off in the bed,” he said.

And I told him I had four children, six grandchildren, and each one of them did an excellent imitation of my mother. He should try another tactic.

I heard him laugh. He said, “But your mother couldn’t teach you to bake the bread.”

I said, “That’s true.” It surprised me to recall that I had told him the story. “I thought if I learned to cook, my mother would die. The way it happened to my friend. I was a stubborn child,” I added. “ ‘A bold piece’ is what my mother called me.”

With the way my eyes were, and the way the hallway light shone behind him, it was impossible to see his face, but I heard his laughter, which was meant to tell me I hadn’t changed. Two small children, who were not real, stood beside him, leaning against the hem of his oversized shirt. It was a trick my eyes had begun to play on me: figures appearing here and there, mostly in my peripheral vision: strangers, children in old-fashioned clothes, sometimes nuns in long habits or women with babies in their arms. A clean and lacy light all about them.

When I told my own children about this, they either nodded impatiently—well, if you’d had that transplant—or commiserated with false enthusiasm: maybe it means you’re regaining some vision. Even with my diminished eyesight, I knew they were exchanging “Let’s be tolerant” looks. Once, I asked them, impatiently—an impatient patient—“Why do you think every mystery is just a trick of the light?”

But my caregiver here in the doorway, in his oversized T-shirt, found in a cardboard box on an access road off the Grand Central Parkway—I knew all his stories just as he knew mine—called these illusions angels, the consoling angels that appeared to only the few, in their old age. He said I saw them because I had once saved someone’s life. Some Island superstition, I thought, or a tactic from the caregivers’ manual. But closer to what I wanted to believe, to tell the truth.

Still, I told him he was very much mistaken. I said I’d worked at Fagin’s funeral parlor until my first child came along. I was the consoling angel in those days, I said. I helped bury the dead. I didn’t save a one of them.

Now he asked me, his hands held to his sides as if to place them on the illusory children’s heads, “Will you call me when you’re ready to get into the bed? Will you do that at least, so I can help you?”

I said, “I will,” and the silence that followed told me he knew I lied. I saw the children move into the room.

“If you ask,” he said softly, “you know I will do it for you. You only have to ask.” And then he disappeared from what was left of my vision, because my eyes suddenly brimmed with foolish tears.

I suppose I stood then, because he caught me as I fell.

The doctor was red-faced. His hands were abrupt. “Mrs. Commeford,” he said, “you are not cooperating.”

Although I could not see it, I knew there must have been perspiration beaded on his forehead, because as he leaned to shout at me, a drop of it hit the sheet beneath my chin. I didn’t see it fall, but somehow I heard the sound it made, and in my pain I imagined that out of that sound, the sound of a raindrop on a dry roof, there rose more profoundly the scent of the hospital laundry, the scent of bleach on the sheet that nearly reminded me, too, of some experience in this life that I might have liked, might have loved, even—my first night with Tom, under sheets that had not been dried in the sun or on a line in my mother’s kitchen—but the pain was a swelling black tide that engulfed the brief, bright recollection in the same way it began to absorb the doctor’s red face and the hovering nurses in white and the light in the room—daylight or electric, who could say. I had been in labor for hours and hours by then, days perhaps.

I had not understood, I had not been told, the extent of the suffering involved, from the cramps of the enema to the scrape of the razor to the endless searing rise and the long aching fall of each contraction.

I had sent so many entreaties to heaven by then—first, that my baby would be healthy; then, that I would please not die; now, only that the pain might end—that I had begun to see myself as some kind of Fuller Brush salesman knocking on a solid door, a door without hinges, without knobs. Hours, days, could it be weeks, into this ordeal, I’d given up the hope of getting an answer, and so turned my pleas instead to my own father, who had loved me and would have wept to see me here, trussed up like a beast in a slaughterhouse, trapped under the weight of my belly, racked with pain, and now, among so many indignities, this man, this doctor, shouting angrily into my face.

“I am cooperating,” I managed to say, and wanted to add something shocking and bitter and profane. But the black tide was surging across memory, too. I couldn’t reach the words I wanted: bastard, son of a bitch, amadan, damn fool.

There was, somewhere beside my ear, a hiss of air. The white nurse leaned in. She held in her hand the rubber mask, offering the ether, but the doctor brushed her away with a wave of his hand. She seemed to disappear into the light. “Oh, please,” I heard my own voice, not roaring out those curse words as I had imagined, but pleading, whimpering and thin.

The man leaned down again. This was not my own doctor but one, I recalled, brought in sometime in the last few hours or days, red-faced, imperious, with abrupt, impatient hands. “A little pain now,” he said, “for a good outcome later. For your baby.” A good outcome.

A bitter drop of his perspiration fell on my lip, and then he leaned across me and his white chest absorbed like cotton the black wash of my pain. He was going to smother me, the only antidote, of course, for my suffering. Fool that I had been to think otherwise. No other relief but dying, letting go of this poor body at last, sloughing it off, a shell, a doll. They could stuff it with horsehair. I would make no more entreaties: I would fall effortlessly against the solid and unyielding door.

They tore me in two. Later, making a joke of it, I said I was run over by the Coney Island Express, the parameters of the pain, from breast to thigh, just about the distance between the black steel of the subway tracks. The odor of blood that filled the crowded room like the underground scent of hollowed rock and cold steel. I heard, in fact, the walloping, beating rhythm of passing subway cars just as the red-faced doctor sliced me apart without sufficient anesthesia, without any at all, I was certain. And pulled the baby out. And sewed me up again so that I felt every stitch. Pain like the walloping beat, light and dark and pounding air, of a passing train, steel against bitter steel, a train passing over me, cracking my hip bones and rattling the teeth in my china skull.

“Unnecessarily withheld,” two of the nurses said later as they bathed me and changed my dressing and returned my limp body, still mine, it seemed, to a bed on the ward. They spoke softly, looking over their shoulders to the door and the hallway outside. “He had his training in the army,” they told me. “He had a bad war.” “Cruel,” they said of him. “Brutal.” They said, “He thinks women need to be more stoic about these things.”

But when the doctor came into the room again, they only smiled and bowed and then scattered like pigeons when he shouted his demands.

I saw my mother in a chair by the window when I opened my eyes again. My mother wore her hat and her pale broadcloth summer suit, and she held her purse on her lap. The slatted sunlight had washed her of all color. I thought for a moment that we might both have died during the long days and nights of my ordeal, not because of the pale light in the blank room, but because of the sweet assurance I felt, waking and seeing my mother there, that I was loved, cherished beyond all reason. The peace of this, the stillness of the room, the temporary suspension of pain, seemed evidence enough that I had come to the end of time. I felt a strange elation. And then I closed my eyes and slept again.

It was evening and the light was low and Tom was in the chair when I next opened them. And then a parched morning, the sound of trays and rolling bassinets and babies crying here and there, the sound of the nurse’s voice as she leaned over me, all of it furred and fiery. I had an unshakable image of red-flocked wallpaper growing like fungus over my tongue and down my throat. They threw whatever covered me aside, but there was no relief in the chill I now felt on my damp skin.

The wide bandages were ripped from what was left of the poor pale flesh suspended between the thin bones of my hips. There was the sweet, pungent odor of pus. There were barked orders from the military doctor, or perhaps this was another one. More indifferent hands running over my flesh; no indignity in it anymore, I had grown so accustomed to it now. A broad nurse with gold curls beneath her cap washed my naked body with a large sponge, running the thing up and down over my extended arm—extended because the nurse had lifted my hand and clamped it under her own armpit, in the casually efficient way a busy woman hanging clothes holds a clothespin in her mouth. She ran the sponge up over my shoulders and between my breasts. The nurse wore a damp apron over her uniform, and her fat arms were as cool and solid as gray marble. There was the faint smell of vinegar in the air.

Later I heard my mother’s voice raised in anger, but had no strength to assure her that there was no need to object: a body, after all, was a paltry thing, and really, Momma, all modesty had long ago gone out the window.

And then there were murmured prayers. A bald priest in a black cassock with a green-and-gold stole, with a missal in one hand and the other reaching for the small container Gabe held out to him in his cupped palm. Gabe, too, in a pale suit, standing at the dark priest’s elbow, but presiding somehow, elegant and assured, nonetheless. I focused on Gabe’s hands. His beautiful hands. And then I felt the flesh of the priest’s thumb against my forehead and my palms. And then someone fumbled with the blanket at my feet and I whispered, or so I was later told, “Oh, honestly.” It was Tom who laughed then. I knew him by his laughter.

Later, he put his dry lips to my cheek and held them there.

“Please,” he said, later still.

“A beautiful boy,” he said, and kissed me again.

He said, “You’re doing fine.”

And another time, “Home soon.”

I heard the loudmouth doctor say, “Built like a child to begin with,” and kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.

Then another morning, and when the doctor came in, I was sitting up in the bed and had just finished a light breakfast. He folded the blanket down to my thighs to examine my incision, but this time with a polite caution I had not seen before. He even said, “If I may.” He touched the bandages with his fingertips. It occurred to me that I had become accustomed to looking down across my body to find his head hovering there. I knew his bald spot as well as I knew Tom’s. He said, “That’s fine, much better,” and then quickly, almost shyly, covered me again. He was, I thought, giving my body back to me. I felt a peculiar regret, the end of some intimacy.

He put his hand on my forearm. He was red-faced and gray-haired and strong-jawed. He looked like an old general. Someone had told me he’d had a bad war. Brutal. “Don’t have any more children,” he said. And then turned to the nurse in the doorway. “Bring this little mother her boy.”

At home—it was agreed that I would go back to my mother’s house until I was fully recovered—my mother said, “There is the ring. There is the sheath. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds.”

The baby, little Tommy, was plump and healthy, alive in my arms, and he woke every three hours. Once again, my mother and I were sharing the big bed. My mother was up at the child’s first whimper, always the warmed bottle of formula at the ready. The ordeal that had almost killed me was reduced now to the hot red incision that split my belly—so jagged and roughly sewn that my mother, seeing it, had whispered, “I’d like to wring his neck.” If I moved the wrong way, the pain from it would flare across my entire midsection, make me stoop to catch my breath.

My long ordeal, as I’d come to call it, reduced as well to the ache in my breasts that my own doctor had assured me would soon go away as my milk dried up. He was gentler than the general, but still he spoke of my breasts and the milk they were producing with a dismissive smile, as if the whole process was some vestige of a primitive time—an immigrant custom, as one of the nurses on the ward had called it when my mother, who kept asking why I didn’t nurse the child, was out of the room—a persistent biological habit that these young mothers, had they only the wherewithal, would have long ago managed to break. None of my friends nursed their babies, and the infection I’d had in the hospital would have precluded it, anyway. Not that this satisfied my mother, who watched the child rooting against my shoulder and said, “He knows what he’s missing.”

A married woman now, nearing thirty, with a beautiful child alive in my arms and a body that had been flayed, publicly, indifferently exposed, not to mention a memory of that solid, unyielding door—death’s door, yes, as I thought of it—remembering for a moment, with a stir in my spine, the exposed breast, lit as if from within, and Walter Hartnett’s mouth moving toward me.

Tom came to the apartment after work and had dinner with us, usually with the baby in his arms, and then sat in the living room holding my hand, chatting and chatting in his cheerful way, only, reluctantly, lifting his hat and kissing us both goodbye when I got up to go to bed. I followed him to the door—I was still to avoid stairs—but more often than not, Gabe walked him to his car. Gabe said, in the first days of this routine, he did it because Tom seemed such a lonely soul, going back alone to our apartment in Queens, but I began to suspect my brother had another intention in accompanying poor Tom down the stairs. There was the matter, after all, of the doctor’s injunction. I must not have another child.

When we were alone in the apartment, my mother said, “There is the ring. There was once a woman who lived on Joralemon, above the Chehabs’ bakery, who you could go to for the thing. But the right doctor could tell you as well. There is the sheath, if Tom will oblige. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds or separate rooms, and if he comes to you in the night, you can say”—she lifted her nose into the air—“ ‘And who’ll raise this baby when I’m dead?’ You can sleep with a soup spoon under your pillow and give him a whack with the back of it—I don’t have to tell you where.” Which got us laughing like girls. My mother knew things she had never spoken of before.

In the kitchen, the bustling sounds of diapers boiling, bottles roiling in the speckled pot.

My mother said, “When the priest came to your bed that night, I told Gabe to send him away. All day I’d been watching out the window, and it may be that I had sun spots still in my eyes, but I didn’t like the look of him, that priest. In his black suit with his tiny bag. I’d been looking out the window all day. I watched the sun grow strong and I counted the shadows as the whole day went by, and I had on my mind that it was nighttime when your father died in this very same place. While you and I were home and asleep, and Gabe was asleep at the rectory. Slipped away in the night when none of us was near. I know I was afraid of the night coming, as frightened as any child. I was afraid that it was in the night that you would slip away from us, too.”

We were at the familiar table, my mother in her usual chair, folding the diapers she had just taken from the line. The summer heat had abated, but the window was still open. I was sitting at Gabe’s end of the table, to avoid the draft. I had the baby on my shoulder.

“The priest, to my eyes, seemed very dark in his suit,” my mother said, “with his little black bag, standing in the doorway and then coming toward your bed. I told Gabe to send him away. He was upset with me. He steered the man by his elbow, just out into the hall, and then he came back in and said that this was something we must do for you, to assure you’d get into heaven. The last rites. He was very serious. You know how he can be. A sacrament, he kept saying, as if I had forgotten.” She raised her chin, in some imitation of the defiance with which she had met Gabe’s words. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she said. “I just didn’t like the looks of the man, coming toward your bed like that. A black-suited banshee. I was desperate with the fear that I’d lose you.

“I said to Gabe, ‘She’s a young woman just after giving birth to her first child, who’s going to keep her out of heaven?’ I said to him, ‘How do you know she won’t see him praying over her and give up the fight?’ I said to him finally, ‘You’re a priest, aren’t you? You’re still a priest. Send that blaggard away and give her the blessing yourself. Didn’t you do as much for your poor father?’”

My mother, telling it, put her fingertips to her lips. The morning sunlight touched her downy cheek and crossed her lap where the white diapers were neatly arrayed. The lace curtain, her handiwork, stirred. “Which was terrible of me,” she said. “Reminding him of that heartache.” She looked at me. My mother wore glasses by then, and her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly permed. No longer for her the long graying braids of the immigrant. “He was barely ordained,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to have asked him to do at the time, and it was a terrible thing to throw in his face just because that mincing black priest made me angry.” She took another clean diaper from the basket on the table, folded it neatly.

The baby began to fuss, and I stood. I rubbed my fingers up and down his spine. I hadn’t known this, that it was my brother who had given my father the last sacrament. It made perfect sense, of course—Gabe was at his first parish then—but the time was a blur and I would not have thought until now to turn my imagination to it. Once, early on, my father had stood at a hospital window and waved to me out in the street—just a pale image behind the high-up glass—but my last real glimpse of him had been at this table, with the sabotaged soda bread, my own childish effort to stop time, in his hand.

I said to my mother, “I didn’t know.”

My mother nodded. “It was a terrible thing to have him do,” she said. And she dropped her hands into her lap, as if from sheer weariness. “Terrible for him.”

She said, “He was all of what, twenty-three? Barely ordained. And your father so wasted by then. His bowels coming up to his throat, if you want to know the worst of it.” She fluttered her thin hand from her breast to her chin to illustrate.

I didn’t want to know the worst of it.

“Even as Gabe was putting the holy oil on him, the poor man was heaving and choking. Cruel. That cancer. Cruel of me to make Gabe go through it. I should have banned him from the room.”

“I don’t remember,” I said, moving to a corner of the dining room to avoid the draft from the open window—ever vigilant now against drafts, missteps, scalding water. I was a mother now and all the terrible things that could maul a child, snatch him from the world, had bared their teeth and trained their yellow eyes on me. The baby was warmly asleep against my shoulder. “I hardly remember that time at all,” I said.

My father a pale figure in the hospital window. All those strangers passing through the lobby, some crying, some carrying armloads of flowers. And then Fagin’s benign shadow. The Mc-Geevers with their mouths full of broken teeth standing over the coffin in the living room, telling someone in the crowd that a man so thin was a walking invitation to misfortune. And then that sweet sleep in the car on the way home from Calvary, one of the sweetest sleeps I’d ever known. Gabe in his collar then, looking down at me, his red eyes puzzled. “You slept? How could you have slept?”

“A blessing for you,” my mother said. “Not to remember.” And she once again touched her lips. “It was my fault, asking him. The poor child’s hands were trembling and the tears were running down his face. And your father was choking back the black bile, trying to encourage him. Trying to help him with the Latin.” She put her fingertips to her chin. “Moving his lips like he used to do when Gabe said his poems. Moving his lips because he couldn’t speak. There was a terrible odor. Rot and bile. The man’s body wasted to nothing. Radium was what they gave him to drink. Poison. His face a skull. The dear man.”

With her hand to her chin she paused and closed her eyes again. I could hear the water boiling in the pots on the stove. I could hear the traffic in the street outside.

“I think your brother’s vocation was squashed right there and then, in that room, if you want to know what I think.” And she opened her eyes again. Behind her thin glasses they were black with her anger.

“I think it was the end of that poor boy’s sweet faith, to see your father suffer the way he did. To see his body suffer. Here he was, newly minted, full up with all the words they’d given him out there, at the seminary, all the prayers, and here was the sight of his father’s body reduced to a whimpering, suffering thing.”

She paused and lifted one of the white diapers, struck it against her lap, once, twice, three times. A keening gesture I had come to know. “How was he to go back to his parish,” she said, her voice low, “and stand in the pulpit and tell the people looking up at him that there was any mercy in this world? How was he to console them?” She glared at me, although it hardly seemed it was me she was speaking to. Her lips were wet with her fury. “His vocation ended right there in that hospital, if you ask me. I’ve always thought it. I’ve thought it for a long while.” And then she suddenly looked at me directly. “But don’t you dare tell him I said so.”

I shook my head. I would not.

My mother began to fold the diapers once more. “So it was terrible for me to bring it up again, at the hospital, when that priest showed up with his black bag. Terrible of me to throw that memory in your brother’s face when what he was trying to do for you was what he still hoped was right. The very best thing he knew, still. Trying to assure me that you’d get into heaven after all your pain. But I wouldn’t be consoled. I didn’t want you in heaven, I wanted you alive, on earth, with your child. When the priest came in again, I swung my purse at his head.”

“Your mother did get her Irish up” was how Tom described it later, in his own version of the scene.

In both versions, Gabe simply put his hands on my mother’s shoulders and said, “Now, Momma, quiet down.” He showed her his empty palms, as if it should be apparent that whatever they once had held, they held no more. I knew the gesture. “Let Father bestow the sacrament,” he said. “He’s a good priest. I’ll stand by his side.”

“And wasn’t he right?” my mother said, smiling at me, changing allegiance, or so it seemed to me, simply by wiping the spit from her lips and shaking the anger from her eyes. She folded and smoothed and patted down the clean diapers on her lap. “Weren’t you better the very next morning? Almost a miracle.”

I nodded. I thought of that solid door and the slip of my shucked body falling against it. I supposed I now had in my own life an equivalent experience, perhaps, to Gabe’s dark night in our father’s hospital room or Tom’s long fall from the plane, or any of the lonely journeys the dead had taken, journeys that couldn’t be shared or even sufficiently described. Now I had my own mystery, mine alone, my singular experience never to be shared or even sufficiently described, try as I might, over the years: death’s door, I would say. Like being run over by the Coney Island Express. None of it sufficient enough to convey what I had been through. Now I knew the quick work pain could make of time, of a lifetime. Now I knew what it was to abandon modesty, body, the entreaties of those who loved you, who wanted you to live.

“It was just that the infection cleared up,” I said. “That penicillin did the trick.”

And my mother, now that she had soothed herself, shaken off the memory of her anger at the priest, at Gabe, at the injustice of my own suffering, glanced at me with sly eyes, with that secret smile about her mouth that warned against the risk of drawing too much attention to the deepest joys. My mother reached out and put her hand to the baby’s back. He was curved warmly against my shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said.

On a Saturday in cool October, two months after my ordeal, Tom put the bassinet and my suitcase into the trunk of the car, tying the lid half closed with rough string. He was giddy, going in and out in his good overcoat. My mother went before us down the stairs with a shopping bag full of the meals she had cooked, Gabe was behind us with the baby in his arms. Tom put one arm around my waist and gripped my right hand with the other as I leaned against the banister, taking one step at a time at his insistence. “I’m really fine,” I said, although the cold air and the sunlight on the sidewalk made my head swim. He eased me into the front seat of the car, only a twinge in my abdomen as I sat—an echo of the insult. Gabe leaned down to place the baby in my arms.

As Tom and I pulled away from the curb, I waved to the two of them, my mother and my brother. They were standing on the sidewalk together—my mother looking very small beside him. Gabe as handsome as ever. I knew they would watch until the car rounded the corner, and then they would go up again together to finish out the suddenly quiet day.

At the apartment in Rego Park, all was Spic and Span and lemon polish and the lingering odor of the apple pie Tom had taught himself to bake that morning, only the beginning of his efforts to make up for a wife who would not learn. There were roses in a vase on the table in the small kitchen. The crib was ready in the single bedroom and our bed was crisply made. He carried up the bassinet and the bottles and the shopping bag of food, while I changed the baby’s diaper and fed him a bottle and put him into his crib. Then Tom made tea and cut two pieces of the pie. I admired the roses while we ate at the small table. Tom told a funny story about the two ladies in the grocery store who had advised him about the best apples to choose.

“While the baby’s asleep,” I told him, “I might go lie down.”

He brought my suitcase in, and I changed out of my dress and took off my stockings and put a housecoat over my slip. I put my glasses on the bedside table. He smoothed down the bedspread for me and took a throw from the closet—all wordlessly, so as not to wake the sleeping child. He lowered the shades while I stretched out on the bed, and when he leaned down to kiss my forehead and whisper sweet dreams, I took his wrist and said, “You lie down, too.”

He walked around the bed, sat at the edge, and untied his shoes. He lay back, somewhat cautiously, I thought, and, with as much distance between us as there could be in a double bed, reached over and took my hand. He gripped it, briefly, to assure himself that I was there, perhaps, or maybe simply to convey that he was grateful for the assurance. I heard him sigh and knew without turning my head he had closed his eyes. I lifted his hand and brought it to my lips.

It was not that my life was less valuable to me now that I had glimpsed what it would be like to lose it. My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child’s need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents’, my brother’s, even Tom’s, had failed to do. Love was required of me now—to be given, not merely to be sought and returned. My presence on earth was never more urgently needed. And yet even the certainty of that fact seemed reason to throw away caution, not to heed it.

I kissed his hand and moved it to my heart. We turned to each other.

“Oh, Marie,” he whispered. “We have to be careful.”

“Why?” I asked.

And I saw that he couldn’t resist a smile at my answer. I was a bold piece. He made his eyes and his mouth grow serious. “You can’t endure another child.”

“Who said?” I whispered.

He shook his head. I still held his hand against my heart. “Your doctor,” he said. “Your brother. Even the priest who came to the hospital, who gave you last rites.”

“Fools,” I said. “Which one of them has ever had a baby?” But Tom closed his eyes and put his hand to his forehead. “What a terrible night that was,” he said. He whispered, “They gave you last rites,” as if the memory of it still took his breath away.

Gently, I touched his cheek to make him see me. I squinted in an effort to see him. “It was only the silly infection,” I said, and moved closer. I felt the ache in my abdomen, the muscle closing up around the ragged scar. “Next time I’ll know better,” I said. “I’ll bring my own ether.”

I began to unbutton his shirt. “Everyone says the second baby’s easier.” Put my lips to his bared throat—was there any place on a body more lonely and vulnerable? “A girl next time,” I said. “One of the nurses told me to have a girl next time. Someone to take care of me in my old age.” But he was still shaking his head.

“I’m not afraid,” I told him. I wasn’t. I had conceived our first child without any notion of the suffering involved. Now that I knew, desire—which was still there, of course—seemed small enough incentive to conceive again. It was courage now that was delightful to me. I was a bold piece. I had stood at death’s door. I had withstood pain. I knew I could make a stand against it, against time, bold and stubborn, a living child in my arms.

When he ran his fingertips over the scar that split my belly, he paused. I heard him catch his breath. “This is foolish of us,” he whispered.

I said, “I suppose it is.”