Someone

THREE

The first strange thing was that Tom brought him in through the front door, which we never used. I had been sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the shadow to cross the lace curtain over the window in the back door, the shadow that meant the car had been pulled into the carport, when I heard instead the rattle and bang and then the odd wheeze of the door at the front of the house. I heard Tom’s voice—loud and buoyant. “Come in, come in,” a jovial innkeeper—and another series of small crashes that was my brother’s suitcase being wrestled into the narrow hall.

Susan was at the sink, making something complicated out of the simple task of brewing iced tea—there was wild mint involved, weeds from the yard, as far as I was concerned, honey, and lemon rind—and the two of us glanced at each other at the sound of the front door opening, the sound of the storm door clutching at the threshold, with the same surprise we might have shown if Tom had led Gabe in through the drier vent. “What in heaven’s name?” I said.

Gabe was standing alone in the middle of the living room. He had his hands at his side. Even as a boy, he had sometimes stretched his smile too wide like this. Conveyed, all inadvertently, the effort he was making to express a pleasure that was, nevertheless, authentic and sincere. It was a shy, dutiful boy’s picture-taking smile, held a beat too long. “Hey there,” he said.

He had lost weight. Something of his natural color had left not only his face and his hair but also the backs of his long hands, his polished dress shoes, the clothes he wore—a white polo shirt buttoned to the neck under a blue Windbreaker, despite the heat, and a pair of gray dress pants. Meticulous as always, yes, his broad long face was clean-shaven, his fair and graying hair carefully combed, but altogether less vivid than he had been, less present, somehow, in the world. I crossed the living room to him, Susan behind me, Helen following. Tom was already halfway up the stairs with the suitcase, and he called to Gabe over the banister. “Look out,” he said, “the gang’s all here,” as if to remind my brother that the women must be humored.

I reached up to put my palms to Gabe’s hollow cheeks. His skin was prickly, glazed with perspiration. He raised both his hands to my elbows. For a moment, we brought our faces together in the modern way, but then we stepped back, into the more comfortable distance we had known growing up. There was the scent of the institution about his clothes: cafeteria food and hospital disinfectant under his aftershave. “How was the traffic?” I said, and Gabe said, “Fine”—even his eyes had lost some vividness—while Tom cried out from the top of the stairs, “Southern State backed up through Hempstead going out. Poor fools won’t hit Jones before sunset.”

I turned to the girls behind me. I hadn’t intended it to, but it felt like a turning away.

“Here’s Susan and Helen,” I said brightly. The two girls had paused just inside the arched doorway of the living room. Each of them raised a hand and wiggled its fingers, Helen ducking her head as she did so, lifting her shoulders shyly—she was a hunchback of shyness in those years—and Susan showing in her smile that she knew she could, if she wished, unmask us all: her jovial father, her cautious mother, her uncle just out of Suffolk—the mental hospital out east that had been the stuff of childhood insults for as long as she could remember:

Where do you go to school, Suffolk?

Hey, Suffolk called, it’s time to go back.

The men in the little white coats want to give you a free ride to Suffolk.

He was, perhaps, the first adult about whom she knew something she was supposed to pretend she didn’t know, and I understood then that this set her well above us all in those first hours of Gabe’s return.

Tom came tapping down the stairs again, his hand hovering over the banister. “You wanted to tell the poor P.R.s,” he said, loud and jovial, perspiring as well, his broad face and bald dome flushed pink, “to take their coolers and their transistor radios and head back to the Bronx.”

Now he was at the foot of the stairs, in the small foyer where the front door—the door we never used—was still open. He pushed it closed, and a measure of sunlight fell away from the foyer, from that end of the living room as well. We all stood there for a moment in the dimmer light, sealed in together by the shut door.

Although the house was small enough, we didn’t use the living room much either: we opened Christmas presents here, and took Easter photos, and when we entertained, we sat in here with cocktails and bowls of salted peanuts. There was only one double window, dressed with white, crisscrossed sheers and venetian blinds that were closed now against the morning’s heat. There was the sturdy upright under the stairs, the gold brocade sectional along the far corner, a coffee table, a pair of Waterford lamps. At the beginning of every summer, I rolled up the good wool rug strewn with roses that had been my mother’s, sent it off to storage, and left the wood floors bare until September. My voice echoed faintly, then, as if on a stage, when I said, “Come on in, Gabe. Make yourself at home.”

I led him back through the dining room and into the kitchen. It was a pass-through kitchen, aqua and pink, a narrow, impractical space, catty-cornered between the dining room and the hallway that led to the two downstairs bedrooms. There was only a small table with two chairs, and Helen darted in and took the farthest one, sitting on one folded knee as she liked to do, as if folding in on herself and yet ready to spring. Susan went back to the counter where she’d been assembling her iced tea. I followed and then turned to my brother. Gabe stood in the doorway, reluctant and uncertain—a good foot taller than Tom, who was behind him, still talking about the drive, the beach traffic this morning going out, the relative ease with which they’d gotten home. “Please,” I said, indicating the chair, “have some tea.” I blushed at my own awkwardness. “Or do you want to wash up?”

Gabe said, “I might do that.” And I showed him to the small powder room, as politely as if he had been a stranger.

In the kitchen, Tom slapped his pockets and asked loudly what he had done with his car keys, and then—“Here they are”—held them up between his thumb and forefinger, laughing as if he had conjured them. He said he really should go right out and move the car out of that hot driveway and up under the carport so the seats won’t melt and the paint won’t fade in this heat. He’d been telling Gabe, in fact, he said, telling him on the drive back, how well the old Belvedere was holding up and how cautious he was about keeping it in good repair.

He jingled the car keys, and they caught Susan’s attention as they had done when she was an infant. This was the summer she learned to drive.

“Shall we?” he said, but Susan shook her head. “You go ahead. I’m still making the tea.” Tom shrugged. I recognized the brief struggle he made to convince himself of the unreasonableness of his hurt feelings. She had never before turned down the opportunity to get behind the wheel with him: she was, understandably, curious about this mad uncle of hers, newly arrived.

When Tom was gone, out through the side door, as was usual, Susan turned to me and said, “Why didn’t he just pull in to begin with? Why’d he come in through the front?” I offered something about getting Uncle Gabe’s suitcase up the stairs, although I understood by then that Tom hadn’t wanted Gabe to feel he had become a back-door guest.

“Weird,” Susan said, and then looked over my shoulder, to Gabe coming back into the room. She suddenly grew busy with her lemons and her mint.

“Sit down,” I said, turning to him. “You must be parched. Susan’s putting together quite a concoction.”

Gabe moved through the small kitchen. I noticed his weight loss once more. It was not a healthy loss. He took the other seat at the little café table, across from Helen, who was studying him unabashedly.

“It was awfully nice of Tom to pick me up,” he said as I served him the tea. Nothing had been added to, or subtracted from, the short smile he wore. “Coming out all that way.” His voice, too, had lost some of its luster. It had always been quiet and even-toned, but now it had a scarred quality to it, as if he had weathered, and recovered from, a disease of the lungs or the throat. “More often than not,” he said, “people leave Suffolk in cabs.”

The girls were watching him silently. I had been prepared not to mention his time at Suffolk at all.

“Which I would have been happy enough to do,” he added.

“Nonsense,” I said.

He had his legs crossed, his arms crossed over his lap. He still wore his Windbreaker, although it was warm in the house in those pre-air-conditioning days. I offered to take it from him, but he raised his hand to say he was fine. His shoes were brand-new wingtips. “It is a lonely sort of way to go,” he said. And laughed a bit. “To leave, I mean,” he said. The skin of his throat had grown corded, the chin loose, although it was clear that he had carefully shaved. “I’ve seen some of the poor loonies walk out to the cab looking for all the world like they’d rather stay.”

The word—“loonies”—startled and pained me. I could feel both my daughters straining against their instructions to remain mute. Helen, of course, was too shy to say a word, but Susan already had the questions on her tongue: Was it awful? Were there strait jackets? Were you in a padded cell?—the same questions she had asked us when we called her and Helen, quietly, into our bedroom the night before and explained to them both in serious, whispered phrases that Uncle Gabe was coming to stay for a while. Not a sick man, Tom had said—he had been visiting the hospital regularly and knew well the psychiatrists, the experts, he called them—only, he said, for a while there, a man overwhelmed. “Swamped” was the word he used. “Like by a big wave,” he told the two girls. “Like at Jones Beach.”

In fact, nearly a year ago, Gabe had walked naked out of the apartment at dawn. He had walked all the way to Prospect Park—weeping—the police report said, which was probably why he wasn’t charged with indecent exposure, only sent to the hospital, and then, after our own family doctor intervened, to Suffolk.

The scene had been described for us in the admitting room of the hospital on the evening of the day Gabe was picked up by the police. There had been a small crowd, apparently, kids mostly, following behind him as he stumbled along. Some of them had thrown mud. There were traces of it on his shoulder blades and buttocks. Others had thrown thin branches torn from trees, or bits of garbage, newspaper, or lunch wrappers, from the street. He was naked and crying. His feet were bare, one was bleeding. Someone in one of the apartment buildings had called the police. The officers approached him warily. They called him “Buddy.” They asked him where he lived, if he had any family, but he was crying and could not speak. They had nothing in their patrol car to wrap him in, and they would have put him in the car as he was, when an old woman from one of the apartments appeared, breathlessly speaking in Italian or Yiddish, the officers couldn’t agree on which it was. She had a blanket in her hands. She didn’t know him. She couldn’t give them any information, but she had, apparently, been following him for quite a few blocks, the blanket held before her.

It was a hot autumn day. They were at the dusty edge of the park, which was much neglected then. There was the clamor of the children’s taunts and the foreign woman’s words and the cars going by, some slowing, some emitting their own jeers. The sunlight itself was clamorous. Exposed to it, my brother’s fair skin would have been mottled and pale. The officers were perspiring in their uniforms, the guns in their black holsters absorbing the heat. One of them, not the one who was speaking kindly, calling him Buddy, but the other—Officers Fernandez and O’Toole, I had no way of knowing which was which—had a nightstick in his hand. My brother stood naked among them, pale and thin, his own hands at his side. He was weeping, unable to speak. They cuffed his hands behind his back. They wrapped him in the blanket the old woman had brought. He let himself be led away.

Tom and I, together in a small room somewhere inside the hospital, had listened, had flinched, had lowered our eyes even as the doctor described the scene, read off the names of the officers, said “weeping” and “crying” interchangeably. Walking out together down those awful corridors to see Gabe, I let out a single breath and shook my head. Tom took my hand. “Did you see that toupee?” he whispered.

“Every time I saw a cab pull up,” Gabe was saying, “I thought of that scene from Harvey. The one when the cab driver comes in to get paid but the sister can’t find her wallet. And while they’re waiting, he tells them how the nutty people are all friendly and happy going out to the sanatorium, but then all angry and impatient when he drives them back, after they’re cured.”

He paused, bent forward from the waist, politely, as if to see if we had heard and understood him. As if to gauge whether he had too suddenly said too much, or had spoken at all. I remembered the look, the slight, questioning, polite leaning forward from his boyhood. His hairline was receding and the light in the kitchen caught the curve of his skull in two places.

Helen said, “I love that movie.” She was sitting opposite Gabe at the small Formica table. She was not sitting up straight, she never did sit up straight. She was hunched over her glass, her pointed little chin nearly touching the rim. There was so much weedy mint in her tea it looked like an amber-lit terrarium. “Harvey made the wallet disappear,” she said.

“The pooka,” Gabe said softly, nodding. He turned toward her politely, but with some surprise, as if he had not expected her to speak.

“So Elwood wouldn’t get the shot,” she said.

He nodded again. “Elwood P. Dowd,” he said. It was the gracious wariness of an adult unused to conversing with children. “Right you are.” The cuff of his Windbreaker had ridden up a bit, exposing the pale skin. There was a hospital bracelet on his bony wrist. He looked at me. “Someone stays up to watch The Late Show,” he said, and Helen’s chin dipped farther, touched the rim of her tall glass.

Susan laughed. “And The Late Late Show,” she said. There was both big-sister mockery in her voice and, perhaps because of Gabe’s presence here, a new forbearance. There was a way her body had, in those days, of bobbing and weaving as she spoke: as if a more assertive, adult Susan—the lawyer she would become—was elbowing past the shy child she, too, had once been. Although she’d once been as skinny as Helen was now, she’d recently begun putting on weight. I was aware of the cool heft of her fleshy forearm. She was standing against the sink, her palms hooked behind her, but her body bobbing forward. I nudged her aside a bit as I opened the utensil drawer and took out the kitchen shears.

“She even tries to stay home sick when there’s a good movie on in the morning,” Susan was saying. “She plans her whole life around the TV schedule.”

“I do not,” Helen said into her glass. “I never do.”

“Are you kidding?” Susan cried, goading her. Showing off, too. “Who circles all the old movies in the TV Guide every week? And puts those reminders on the bathroom mirror, like National Velvet, Tuesday?”

Helen dropped her chin yet again, drew her raised shoulders nearly up to her ears. “No, I don’t,” she said softly, while her sister said, “Of course you do, don’t lie,” and laughed.

I crossed the narrow room and took my brother’s hand from his knee without a word. Without a word, he gave it to me. “I’m of the same mind,” he said to the girls. “A good old movie on TV can make my whole day.” His flesh was cold and there were graying, golden hairs on the backs of his pale fingers. I slipped the kitchen shears between the plastic cuff and the blue underside of his narrow wrist. I neatly cut the thing in half, then touched his knee before I carried the bracelet to the trash.

“Guess I won’t need that anymore,” he said, and I tried to sound lighthearted. “We know who you are,” I said.

Gabe turned to Helen, “What’s the movie today?”

Helen raised her eyes to the clock on the wall. She had a narrow face and small dark eyes, black-lashed and lovely. She had perfect vision, both girls did. A blessing from their father. “A Hitchcock,” she said. “Shadow of a Doubt.”

“Joseph Cotten,” he said. “Another good one.”

Helen said, “I don’t know who that is.”

Something authentic entered my brother’s smile. “Joseph Cotten,” he said. He shifted in his chair, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. He looked at me. “Whatever happened to Joseph Cotten?”

I shrugged, aware of, grateful for, the grace of this ordinary conversation. “Who knows?” I said airily. “All those old actors. Probably making commercials.”

“Probably dead,” Susan said.

“It’s from nineteen forty something,” Helen added. “The movie, nineteen forty-one or nineteen forty-two.”

“Ancient history,” Gabe said. “Your mother was still a babe in arms.”

I laughed. The air in the warm room had grown a bit lighter. “Hardly,” I said. “I was working at Fagin’s by then.”

Gabe smiled a warmer smile. There was as well the grace of a shared past. “The consoling angel,” he said. He tapped the crushed pack against his palm, extracted a single, filtered cigarette and then the matchbook inside the cellophane. I took an ashtray from the windowsill and crossed the room to put it on the table. Again, I touched a fingertip to his knee. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I did get five new dresses out of the deal.”

And I saw my daughters glance warily at each other: they knew this story, too.

Gabe bent his head as he struck the match and then waved it in the air when the cigarette was lit. He blew the first smoke toward the ceiling. “We were all great fans of the afternoon movie out there in the insane asylum,” he said.

The side door burst open and Tom bustled in once more, talking. He was saying how earlier that summer he had hung two tennis balls from the rafters of the carport, a parking guide for Susan, to keep her, he said, walking into the tiny kitchen, swinging his keys, from knocking us all off our chairs in the middle of dinner when she put the front end through the dining-room wall—as women drivers, no doubt, were apt to do. In fact, just yesterday, he said—and look at all this lovely mint, will you, Gabe, grows wild in our own yard, we should make mint juleps—just yesterday, he went on, he saw a woman take out a hedge on the corner of her own lot as she backed down her driveway at what must have been forty miles an hour, her husband standing on their front steps with his hands in the air.

He demonstrated, throwing his hands straight up and then letting them fall back in despair to his own bald head.

He turned to Susan, who was leaning against the kitchen counter, tolerating him, but fondly, fondly. There were times through my daughter’s adolescence that I would have been grateful to have some of that fondness. “I’ll probably get an extra year or two in purgatory,” Tom said, “for adding another woman driver to the world.”

He poured himself a glass of iced tea and loaded it with sugar, even though Susan told him there was honey in it already. “So here’s the thing,” he went on, addressing Gabe. “I put those g.d. tennis balls up there myself, and yet every single time I pull into the carport, they hit the window and I jump about a mile. They about give me a heart attack every time.”

The girls started laughing. He about had a heart attack, they repeated, laughing, every single time. Jumps a mile and cries, Jesus H. Christ.

“Sometimes worse,” Helen added.

“Sometimes he says, “ ‘Holy shit,’ “ Susan said, and I cried out, stamped my foot, as if to crush the scuttling word. Susan said, “I’m just quoting.”

“I don’t know why I can’t remember they’re there,” Tom was saying. “They get me every time.”

This, was, of course, a lie. They had startled him once, but never again. The rest was an act, a comic set piece he had honed over the past few weeks. I knew this. The girls knew it, too. The sudden start, the cursing, the hand to his startled heart, were all part of the joke. One of his jokes on himself, meant to get us laughing at him, meant to get his daughters’ impulse to mock him seem only a weak afterthought to the way he mocked himself. I knew this. The girls knew it.

Gabe was smiling at us all through the smoke from his cigarette.

“He thinks it’s the roof caving in,” Susan said. “Or meteorites.”

“Yellow flying squirrels,” Helen added, giggling. She looked at her father. “Well, that’s what you said yesterday. You said, Goddamn yellow flying squirrels.”

Tom turned his straight face to Gabe. “You see what I put up with here?” he said calmly. “With the boys away, I’m the only man in the house, and this is what I have to put up with. Thank God you’re here.”

The smoke poured out from Gabe’s small smile, it rose up from the cigarette in his hand. His legs remained crossed, his arms crossed over his lap; the wrist of the hand that held the cigarette, bare now, was long and blue-veined and covered in pale hair. The distance between the boy he had been, my brother, and this stranger sitting here now behind a veil of smoke seemed vast. I felt a sudden vertigo, looking across it, and leaned against my daughter’s bare, damp arm as Tom began to tell Gabe a story about some flying squirrels that had once invaded the crawl space behind the upstairs room (“Where you’re staying now, Gabe, but don’t worry”) and the comical pair of exterminators—“Mutt and Jeff”—who had captured the things and taken them home for pets. One of them, the little one, coming to the door some days later wearing the baby squirrel on his shoulder like some kind of mountain-man pirate—“I kid you not.”

He was a man who loved to talk.

“Did you see that toupee?” he had said as we left the room in the ancient Brooklyn hospital where Gabe’s nightmare had been described for us. He shook his head and let out a single sigh as we headed down that bleak corridor.

He said, “You’d think a guy like that could afford a better rug.”

He said softly, leaning to speak softly into my ear, “A psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake.” He held my hand. “Wearing a rug like that.” He chuckled. “Talk about a cry for help”—the very words the doctor had said about Gabe—“terrible-looking thing. You wonder his wife doesn’t tell him. Must itch like hell.” Sailing us both down that bleak hallway until we’d reached the door of the ward where Gabe was lying, sedated, his back to us, his face to the wall.

Helen said, “May I be excused?” when her father came to a pause, never an end, to his flying-squirrel story. It was five of four.

“The movie,” Susan said, all wisdom and forbearance.

Tom did a theatrical stagger. “Tell me you’re going to watch a movie … on a nice summer day?”

“It’s hot,” Helen said, and Susan cried, “Dad, she does this every day!”

I added that she had been swimming in the Graysons’ pool all morning.

But, of course, in those days Tom was never home from work at this hour to know this was his daughter’s summer routine. He’d only taken the day off to drive out to Suffolk to fetch Gabe.

“And where is Lucy Grayson?” Tom asked, looking under his elbows. He explained to Gabe, “The neighbor kid, Helen’s best friend. Her shadow. They’re usually joined at the hip, those two.”

“Her Gerty Hanson,” I told Gabe, bringing him in.

“She’s home,” Helen said quickly. And before I could catch his eye, Tom asked, “What? Did you have a spat?”

Helen lowered her chin and Gabe leaned forward again, over his crossed knee and his crossed arms.

“I hope she hasn’t stayed away,” he said, “because of me.” And then, in the sudden awkwardness that followed, he turned toward the table to put out his cigarette, as if to give us all time to rearrange our faces. I had indeed asked Helen not to bring Lucy over until we had Uncle Gabe well settled in.

“Believe me, Uncle Gabe,” Susan said kindly, “you’re not missing anything. This girl has the most annoying voice you’ve ever heard. Like Minnie Mouse if Minnie Mouse smoked a carton a day. Right?” she asked Tom. She was quoting him.

Tom laughed and said, “Right. A twelve-year-old with a voice like a consumptive hooker.” And I cried out another objection.

“Can I go?” Helen whispered, her eyes to the clock just over the kitchen doorway. “It’s starting.”

Gabe leaned to return his cigarettes and his matches to his pocket. “I’ll watch it with you,” he said. “If I may.”

There followed a sudden bustle in the crowded little room. Helen rushed to the basement stairs to get the TV turned on—it was an old set and needed a few minutes to warm up. The rest of us followed. The basement was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. It smelled heavily of damp earth and heating oil. Helen already had the set on and had taken her usual place in the worn chair closest to the TV. I directed Gabe to the old couch. Susan, saying she would watch only for a minute and then go wash her hair, took the rocking chair beside them. Tom didn’t have the patience to watch television in the middle of the afternoon—and could never watch any movie silently, anyway—but stayed long enough to see everyone settled. He had some errands to run, he said, and showed me a prescription from Suffolk cupped in the palm of his hand. “Enjoy the show,” he said, and then climbed the basement stairs, his step light, his hand held lightly over the banister.

I went back to the laundry room to empty the drier and start another load. I finished my ironing, carried the fresh clothes to the bedrooms upstairs, and put them away, then went down again to put the new load into the drier. Susan was still watching the movie with Helen and Gabe—there was forties movie music and the voice of a young actress. Only Gabe noticed me as I came down the stairs, and he raised one hand from his thigh.

When I went upstairs again to start dinner, I found Tom reading the paper on the screened porch in back. I peeled the potatoes and set them to boil. Then I poured a beer into a pilsner glass from the freezer and brought it out to him. He said, “Thank you, dear,” and offered me the first sip. This was our routine. First and best, he sometimes said. I tasted the foam, the icy beer underneath, and then handed it back to him. “Should we offer one to Brother Gabe?” he asked.

I shrugged. “What do you think?”

“Drink’s never been his trouble,” Tom said. And paused. “Although there was some discussion, out there, about your father being a drinker. Sins of the father, you know. All that Froodian stuff.” He widened his eyes, mocking himself and the doctors simultaneously.

I looked into my hands. It was Tom who had driven out to Suffolk every Thursday night to sit in on the therapy sessions in the men’s ward. When we visited together, we drove out on Sunday afternoons. We brought Gabe cigarettes and candy and sat outside when we could. We talked about meaningless things and saved our pity for the other patients, whose trouble was evident in their puzzled faces or the defeated slump of their shoulders.

I told Tom once that there was something of Gabe’s old seminary about the place. He had laughed and said there was also something of the stalag.

Tom said now, “It’s just their way of trying to find someone to blame for his trouble.”

Through the screened wall behind him I could see the early-evening sun casting long shadows across the back lawn, the small patio and the flower beds and the ocean blue sides of the pool. I could hear the gurgle of the filter and the metallic pock and shallow calls of the kids in the next yard, playing ball.

It was a homely room. The floor was painted concrete and the screens stained here and there with rust. Even then, the cushions on the wrought-iron garden chairs were yellowing beneath their painted vines, splitting along the seams. There was a sickly looking Wandering Jew and a spindly spider plant in the corner, a basket of old pool toys no longer used. Beside it, Tom’s easel and paints and a nearly finished painting of the bed of impatiens in the front of the house. Both inexpert and pretty.

“Will we ever know,” I asked him now, “Gabe’s trouble?”

Tom placed his beer on the glass-topped garden table. Were I to dream again, I would dream myself into this room, at this hour. I would take the fading cushion beside him.

“We only know what the doctors tell us,” Tom said. “Depression.” In those first weeks, he had come back from his visits to Suffolk and joked that this was the first time he had ever heard the word used without the “the.”

“Which pretty much tells us nothing,” he added.

“What’s the prescription for?” I asked him, and he said gently, “Only to help him sleep.”

I said, “He never was an easy sleeper. Even as a kid.”

And then Susan appeared in the doorway to say, “Well, that was ironic.”

I looked at her over my shoulder. “What?”

“The movie,” Susan said, moving into the room. She had stayed to watch it all. “Do you know what it’s about? It’s about Uncle Charlie. He comes to visit his sister”—she bobbed forward a little as she said it—“his sister and his niece, his sister’s daughter.” She bobbed again. “The niece thinks Uncle Charlie’s the most charming guy in the world, just worships him, until she finds out he’s a murderer. That he murders old women and steals their money. And their jewelry. So of course, he tries to murder the niece, too. He even looked a little like Uncle Gabe.”

I said, “Susan,” because Helen was already behind her. Gabe following. They both seemed a little subdued.

“How was the movie?” I asked brightly, and Helen said, “Good.”

Gabe said, “Not very fair to the bachelor uncles of the world.”

I glanced at Susan, who was blushing beneath her freckles, her eyes cast down. “So I hear,” I said.

“I’ll be forever suspect, I’m afraid,” he said. And smiled that short smile. He still wore his Windbreaker. There was a gleam of perspiration along his lip.

I offered Gabe a beer and then went into the kitchen to pour it. I suggested he take off his jacket and sit outside with Tom, to catch whatever breeze there was through the screens. While the girls set the table and I finished making dinner, I listened to the voices of the two men as they shared the paper and talked about the news.

I served mostly cold meals in the heat of those summers: sliced ham and coleslaw from the deli, cucumbers in vinegar, potato salad, and bakery rolls. Gabe sat at our older son’s place. His manners, as always, were meticulous and elegant. They had been meant, after all, to belong to a bishop. Watching him at my table, I briefly entertained the notion that the lace-curtain pretensions my parents had taught us might well have been meant as a way (frail at best, but a way nonetheless) of cosseting, corralling, patting down, and holding in, whatever it was that had undone him last summer.

I made note to mention this to the girls when they slumped (Helen) or licked the back of a spoon (Susan), that good manners, gracious conversation, might well be all we have, finally, to cosset and confine confusion.

Our two boys, Tommy and Jimmy, our Irish twins eleven months apart, were working in Hampton Bays that summer. Having a fine old time, Tom explained to Gabe over dinner, bringing him in. Attracting girls like flies at their age, he said. Two college boys, he said. Two Mr. Party Guys. Both brown as a berry, last time we saw them, what with lying out in the sun all day. Jumping into the ocean to cure their hangovers, no doubt, and then working in the restaurant at night. Not a care in the world, Tom said. “Not like you and I were, Gabe, at that age.”

“I worry about them,” I added. “What with all that’s going on. Drugs and whatnot. And the way the girls are these days.”

I knew Susan was rolling her eyes.

Tom waved his hand, dismissing my words. “They’re just sowing some wild oats,” he said. It was an ongoing argument between us. “Enjoying themselves while they’re young.”

“Oh sure,” I said. I did not like to be dismissed.

Gabe looked at me and smiled. He had taken off his Windbreaker, and in his white polo shirt he seemed both younger and frailer than he had when he arrived. Maybe more like himself as a boy. Or maybe more like our father, although Gabe was now older than our father had lived to be.

“Do you know the prayer of St. Augustine,” he asked me, “the one he said when he was their age?” Gabe pronounced the saint’s name with a soft ending, in what I thought of as the priestly way, which may be why I felt there was suddenly something reverent in our attentiveness. Even the girls grew serious, or perhaps wary. Despite our best efforts, they were no more pious than I had been at their age, little pagans.

“No,” I said.

There was a warmth in my brother’s brown eyes. “ ‘Grant me chastity and self-control,’ “ he said, quoting the saint, “ ‘but please, God, not yet.’”

We all laughed—the girls with some relief, perhaps, to discover that he was not a solemn man, Tom with all the old affection and admiration for this intelligent brother of mine.

“He’s your guy, isn’t he?” Tom said, “St. Augustine,” and he pronounced the name with a layman’s hard ending—like the city in Florida. He did so, I knew, more out of humility than ignorance. In his mouth, Gabe’s finer pronunciation would have been a pose. “You’ve mentioned him before.”

“I’m an admirer,” Gabe admitted. “The man struggled mightily.”

I stood to clear the table. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I only know I sleep better when the boys are at home.”

Over ice cream, Susan dissected the four o’clock movie. She outlined its flaws in logic and probability, budding lawyer even at seventeen. How could it be that no one knew, she said, and really people weren’t that naïve, and surely that was way too much of a coincidence.

“What’s the point of watching a movie,” shy Helen asked her sharply, “if you’re going to spend the whole time looking for reasons not to believe it?”

“It is called Shadow of a Doubt,” Susan answered.

“Well, I’d put my faith in Alfred Hitchcock,” Tom said.

Gabe said, “At my first parish,” and nodded to Tom, who would remember, “there was a widow with three children, the youngest twins, who was at ten o’clock Mass every Sunday. I asked our pastor about her when I first got there, thinking we should do something for her, for her kids, at least, and he says to me, ‘There’s a hard case. She’s a drinker.’”

Susan and Helen both laughed a bit, and Gabe glanced at them and smiled.

“No, seriously,” he said. “That’s what he told me. It was well known to everyone in the parish, he told me. She had a drinking problem, three kids and all. She was as neat as a pin in church on Sunday, so were the kids, and the couple of times I’d said hello to her she seemed fine to me, but the pastor told me I was wet behind the ears if I couldn’t see it. She was a real alcoholic, he said. I couldn’t get over it. I started to look for her. She always looked cold sober to me. The kids were quiet in church. They always had money for the plate and never came late or left early. I asked the pastor again how he knew, what the evidence was, had he seen her stumbling or weaving or whatnot, and he called me a puppy, said I was naïve. Said once more that it was well known. I couldn’t figure it out. There was no one else to talk to. I didn’t want to fan any rumors by asking around. But then I noticed that every Sunday morning, as she and the kids were walking to church, she ducked into the candy store just down the block from the rectory. The three kids would wait outside, she’d duck in and out in no time. Maybe, I thought, she was taking a nip then. Maybe that’s what she did.”

“What a shame,” Tom said, but Gabe held up his hand.

“So one Sunday morning when I’m not scheduled to say the ten, I walk down to the candy store at about nine forty-five and go inside for a cup of coffee. While I’m there, sure enough, she comes in. She buys a roll of Life Savers and pays with a dollar bill and goes out again. After she leaves, the owner, the candy store owner, turns to me and says, “ ‘There’s a project for you, Father. She’s in here every Sunday morning buying mints. Covering up the alcohol on her breath. Before Mass.’

“ ‘Did you smell alcohol on her breath?’ I asked him, and I could see by his indignation that he hadn’t. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Why do you think she’s buying the mints?’”

“Why?” Helen said.

Gabe smiled. “To cover the smell of the drink, or so he thought. But I had a hunch. I followed them into the church. I asked the ushers to let me help with the collection. I passed the plate, and sure enough, she adds a quarter, the boy adds a quarter, and the twins each put in a dime. At the second collection only the mother puts in a quarter. Three quarters, two dimes every Sunday. Ninety-five cents. Life Savers were a nickel then.” He sat back. “She’d been doing it for years, breaking a dollar before she went into church. And that, as far as I ever knew, was the sole source of the rumors that had her an alcoholic.”

Tom laughed. “Never assume,” he said. He drew the word in the air, circled the first part and the last: this was not a new routine. “You’ll make an ass,” he said, circling, “out of u and me.” The girls were bearing with him, love and pity in their eyes and their smiles. “You ever explain it to the old pastor?” he asked Gabe.

“I did,” Gabe said. I wondered at the bond between these two, strengthened further, perhaps, by those weekly conversations in the men’s ward. “But he wasn’t much interested,” Gabe added. “We had bigger fish to fry by then.”

Helen said, hunched over her dish of ice cream, the spoon in the air. “How come you’re not still a priest? You didn’t like it?”

I felt what would have been my mother’s impulse to grab her by the upper arm and lead her from the table. Susan said, delightedly indignant, “Helen,” confounding the rudeness of the question by acknowledging it. But Helen’s face took on Tom’s look of innocent uncertainty. Guileless. Was that wrong?

Gabe said, kindly enough, “It was the greatest privilege of my life, to be ordained.” The rest of us were silent. He was looking at Helen alone. “But after my father died, I couldn’t see leaving my mother, and your mother, to live alone. Someone had to be there,” he said. He put his tongue in his cheek, moved his mouth as if he tasted something sweet. “Your mother couldn’t cook, you know. And she had some wild oats of her own. Someone had to be there to guide her.”

“There you go,” Tom said happily. He nodded, as if the matter was settled, now and forever. It only took the asking. “And think about this,” he said to the two girls. “If it wasn’t for your uncle coming back home, your mother and I would never have met, which means you wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be here,” and he gestured, dramatically, taking in the whole house. “So say thank you to the man. Thank him for changing his plans.”

The girls, laughing, puzzled, bowed their heads. “Go on,” Tom said, encouraging them, overdoing it, I thought.

“Thank you,” Helen murmured, smiling, into her plate. Susan shook her head and said in a singsong, mocking way, “Thank you, Uncle Gabe.”

After dinner, I invited him for a walk around the neighborhood. It was dusk. Sprinklers were going on the darkening squares of green grass, and neighbors on webbed lawn chairs raised their hands as we passed by. Gabe smoked. I reminded him of the long walk we’d taken when I was seventeen, when Walter Hartnett had broken my heart. “Seventeen,” he said, and shook his head. He remembered it. He looked straight ahead as we walked, and he held his cigarette low against his thigh, cupped inside his hand. “I can’t imagine anything I said was any help to you.”

“It was,” I said.

“Walter Hartnett,” Gabe repeated the name. “The kid with the bad leg. Bill Corrigan’s right-hand man. Poor Bill.”

And I added, “Poor Walter, too.”

Gabe said, “You can’t blame a man for saying he’s had enough pain.”

I supposed he could have been referring to either one of them.

There was the suburban smell of cut grass and honeysuckle, the sounds of televisions and radios, there were the halos of lampposts, house lights coming on. It is solved by walking, he had said. He had walked out into those ravaged streets of the old neighborhood, naked, weeping.

“You’re welcome to stay, you know,” I told him. “The upstairs room is yours for good. When you go back to work, you can drive to the station with Tom. Susan will be off to college in the fall and Helen’s soon to follow. The boys are on their own for the most part. You’ll be company for me and Tom. You’ll keep Tom from talking my ear off when he retires. We’ll be company for one another.”

Gabe smiled. “Thank you,” he said simply. He thought for a bit and then said, “I’ll have to go back to pack up the apartment. I’ll have to break the lease.”

I wished he had said “the old apartment.”

“Tom’s been over there,” I told him. “He’s already taken out anything worth saving, which wasn’t much.” Gabe’s clothes, some pictures, all of his books. Even before my mother died, we had moved anything of value out here. “You should be happy to break the lease,” I said. “The building’s worse than ever these days.” And then I added, only half joking, “These days, I wouldn’t wish Brooklyn on a dog.”

He smiled again, but less sincerely. Still loyal.

As we turned the corner to start home, we came upon a group of children, five or six of them, running across three lawns, catching lightning bugs. Among them was Helen’s friend Lucy Grayson, and she paused as we passed by, dragging her bare feet in the grass as if to stop her momentum. “Hi, Mrs. Commeford,” she said in her voice like stirred gravel. She was a skinny girl with nut-brown legs beneath her cutoffs, wide eyes, and a perpetually opened mouth. I waved and said, “Hiya, Lucy,” and then saw how the other children were slowly stopping, too, gathering around Lucy as if her sudden inertia had pulled them in. Each of them said a small greeting, at odd, firefly-like intervals—“Hi, Mrs. Commeford.” “Hi.” “Hi.”—until we had walked past. And then I heard one of them shout, “Suffolk called.” It was a boy’s voice, choked with laughter. It was followed by a twitter of hushes, and then more laughter still as the children scattered again across the blinking grass.

Gabe looked straight ahead, smiling that short smile. I touched his arm, just a fingertip to the inside of his elbow. He tossed his cigarette into the street.

“Uncle Charlie’s come to town,” he said, and it took me a few seconds to realize he was referring to the old movie. “Another bachelor uncle with a shadowy past,” he said. “Forever suspect.”

“Nonsense,” I told him.

When we returned to the house, there was a strange car in the driveway. Strange to me, because Gabe said, “This might be a fellow I know.”

The front door was open once again, the porch light lit above it, and we went in that way and found Tom and the girls and a strange man sitting in the living room. There were two glasses of beer on the cocktail table and Helen was just placing the nut bowl beside them. The man stood as we entered. He was tall and broad through the shoulders. He wore a pale-blue short-sleeved shirt and gray dress pants like my brother’s. He had short dark hair, heavily Brylcreemed, graying at the temples. He said a jaunty “Hello there” as he stood, and then another “Hello, there” as Gabe introduced him. “Matt Cain, a friend of mine.” From his days at IT&T.

I sat on the edge of a slipcovered chair and made small talk as best I could, although our voices in the rugless room echoed and rang. I felt beads of perspiration running down my back. Matt Cain knew the street in Rego Park where we’d had our first apartment. He himself lived in Bay Ridge. Still with IT&T on Park Avenue, yes. He had a wide thin mouth and too much gook in his hair, although, to be fair, he might have just come from the barber. There was a ghost of white skin along his hairline. A thick handful of wiry black hair at his throat, as well. Twice he offered his cigarettes all around, and twice Tom and I raised a hand to refuse them. Although Gabe took one and leaned forward from the other side of the couch as Matt Cain held the match to it.

I excused myself and went into the kitchen. The girls had washed the dishes but left them piled in the drainer. The pot I’d boiled the potatoes in was still dirty on the stove. I washed it, and washed out the sink. And then put the dishes away, not bothering to muffle the ring and clank of my lifting and stacking and returning, one by one, the forks and knives and spoons to the utensil drawer. I was being rude, I knew. Purposefully. And I wasn’t sure why. I drank a long glass of water at the sink, held my wrist under the running faucet to cool myself down. I dried my hands and put a smile on my face and returned to the warm living room to ask brightly if the men would like another beer—or, if it wasn’t too hot, some coffee?

Gabe, it seemed, had been telling them about Suffolk. His routine there. Tom and the girls—Susan perched on the arm of her father’s chair, Helen on the floor at his side, her legs crossed and her chin in her hands—were watching him solemnly. Matt Cain had leaned himself back against the corner of the couch, his arms spread out along the back and the side, his legs splayed—he had thick legs, long, with heavy thighs; he was altogether heavier than he seemed on first impression. He had his head turned a bit; he was picking a bit of tobacco from his tongue, but he’d been listening, too—amused or moved, it was hard to tell.

And I interrupted, breezing in to offer them another beer, coffee if it wasn’t too hot, meaning—intending, I knew, although I would not have said, in the moment before I spoke, that this was my intention—to graciously bring the night to a close. And wanting to kick myself in the second after I spoke when I saw, or heard, as if in some fading echo of the conversation I’d brought to a halt, that Gabe was telling them about his life at Suffolk and I had missed it.

Matt Cain pulled in his great big legs and leaned to the coffee table to put out his cigarette. “None for me, thanks,” he said. He placed his hands on his thighs and turned to my brother. “I should go,” he said. There seemed to be a thousand meanings conveyed in it. Gabe said, “I’ll walk you out.”

Matt Cain insisted on carrying his and Gabe’s beer glasses to the kitchen. He shook hands with me there, and with Tom and the two girls. I knew the smell of whatever he used on his hair would linger. As he started back through the dining room to the front door, Gabe caught his shoulder. He indicated the door to the carport. “Susan tells me this is the preferred means of egress and ingress,” Gabe said, and winked at me.

“I’ll put on the light,” I said.

Through the curtained glass in the door, I could see the two men pause. Gabe pointed to the ceiling of the carport and Matt Cain playfully bounced the hanging tennis balls off the windshield of Tom’s car. I heard them laugh, and I hoped in my heart there was no mockery in it. Not of Tom, I thought, who had lost a day of work to drive all the way out to Suffolk to fetch him. Who had driven out there a dozen times this year to sit in the men’s ward with him so he would not be alone. I watched them move away from the car, around the corner of the house to the driveway.

I finished up in the kitchen, and when Gabe hadn’t yet come in, I left a note on the dining-room table. Gone to bed. But don’t hesitate to knock if there’s anything you need. I added, Sleep well, choosing between it and We’re so glad you’re here.

The girls were in the basement, the television was on, and I called down to tell them, Not too late. Helen said, Susan’s already asleep, and Susan said sleepily, No, I’m not. Usually I left the basement door open so I could hear them when they came up, but tonight I closed it.

I went into my room. Tom was already in bed. He was reading a folded-back news magazine, his glasses perched on his nose. On these hot summer nights he slept in his shorts and a thin white tank shirt that exposed his fleshy shoulders, as pink and round as his head. He had the window fan on high and only looked up briefly when I came in, smiled vaguely. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and put on my summer nightgown. Then I crossed the room once more and turned the fan down to a low hum. I went through my fusty bedtime routine. Turned the clock around on my night table. Poured some hand cream into my palms and spread it up and down my arms. Placed a pale blue hairnet over the back of my head. Turned off the lamp that had been my mother’s in the old apartment and slipped off my glasses. The room contracted and lost every edge. I got into bed and, as was our routine, turned on my side to face Tom as he read. I closed my eyes. As was his routine, Tom lowered his arm to the mattress beside me, giving it to me. I put my two hands on his forearm, moved to put my lips to his skin.

I had turned the fan down low enough so that I could hear Gabe coming in and the girls coming up from the basement. Low enough, too, so that I could ask Tom what Gabe had said while I was in the kitchen, about his routine at Suffolk. Had he mentioned the electric shock? Had he talked about what had brought him there. That terrible day?

I closed my eyes and put my lips to my husband’s cool flesh, and he, still reading, brushed the back of his hand against my breast. I had not liked Gabe’s friend, and in my distaste, I had gone into the kitchen and lost out on what Gabe had said, about his routine at Suffolk. About what had brought him there. I had turned the fan down low enough so that I could now whisper, “Who was that guy, that friend of his?”

Tom flipped the magazine closed with one hand and placed it on his nightstand. He took his reading glasses off and leaned toward the light, keeping his arm on the mattress beside me, pulling away just a little to reach the cord. He sat back. It was his habit to ease himself into bed as a man might sink into a tub. He moved under the sheet just a little, keeping his back against the pillows that were piled against the headboard. Again, idly, he moved his hand against my breast.

“Do you remember Darcy Furlong?” he said into the darkness, just above the whirring of the fan. “From the brewery?”

I laughed. “That name,” I said.

I let go of his arm and rolled over on my back. He put his hand on my hip.

“Rumors went around about him for years,” he said. “Foolish things, mostly. Someone found him knitting in the lunchroom. There was supposed to be a tube of lipstick in his desk drawer. He wore polish on his toes—although some of us joked that, hell, if that was true, at least it meant that at some point he took off those damn saddle shoes.” He chuckled. “Nothing terrible, really. Just small, snide things said about him now and then. But Mr. Heep got wind of it, eventually. He always had one ear to the ground in that way. So Darcy was out sick for a while—some minor surgery, we all signed a card. And during this time Mr. Heep calls us in for a meeting. I told you about this.”

I nodded. I recalled it vaguely. “Mr. Heep said he was aware that there were certain kinds of rumors going around about Mr. Furlong and all he wanted to know was did anyone have any way to prove they were true? Anyone have proof? That’s all he asked. Of course, no one did. What in the world would serve as proof? We saw him in the office every day. He was a good worker. He came in on time in the morning and went home at night. He was a bachelor. His family lived down South. What else was there to know? And when no one answered, Mr. Heep said, ‘Well, neither do I, so until someone has proof, evidence, that what you have to say about Mr. Furlong is the absolute truth, I want the rumors to stop. I want an end to them. And I’ll fire the first man who defies me.’”

I heard the back door open and close. Heard, I was certain, Gabe pausing to lift my note from the dining-room table. I was aware of the coolness of my words—I had not written, after all, We are so glad you’re here.

I could hear Gabe’s footsteps on the bare floor of the living room as he crossed to the staircase. Tomorrow I would tell him again that he was welcome to stay.

“That was it,” Tom was saying. “The rumors stopped. Sure, everyone was free to continue to think what he liked, but no one said a word. I have to say, I admired Mr. Heep for the way he handled it. Put a stop to it. Whatever Darcy Furlong was—fairy or window dresser or momma’s boy, or just a lonely guy who liked fancy socks and his own routine—what good was to come of all of us talking about him? What were we going to discover? What were we going to change?”

In the darkness, I felt him sink himself a bit farther into the bed, as was his routine. I felt myself, my heart, sinking as well. My brother had been the golden child reciting poetry I couldn’t understand, the thin seminarian emerging from the shadow of the tall trees, his prayer book cupped in his hands. Not a year in his first parish, he had given my father the last sacrament, even as the poor man’s suffering was at its last and terrible height. I had been startled by the ferociousness of his grief—you slept?—when I woke up in the car we had hired from Fagin. I had been at various times annoyed and puzzled by his solitude and his brooding, his vigilance, the way he feared what was ugly or unkind, and the way compassion seemed to upend him—walking out naked and weeping into the ravaged streets where we had been young. My brother was a mystery to me, but a mystery I had always associated with the sacred darkness of the bedroom we had shared in Brooklyn, or the hushed groves of the seminary, or the spice of the incense in the cavernous church, even with his lifelong, silent communion with the words he found in his books. Incomprehensible, yes, but in the same way that much that was holy was incomprehensible to me, little pagan.

And now my heart fell to think that the holy mystery of who my brother was might be made flesh, ordinary flesh, by the notion that he was simply a certain kind of man.

To think that he had walked out that summer day, crying, weeping, naked, and grieving, not for the mortal world, but for himself alone.

I felt Tom lean down in the darkness to kiss the top of my head, and in doing so, he put his hand to my arm, my elbow. “Now, I’m not saying I know anything about this guy who was here tonight,” he said. “All I’m saying is, we should let Gabe be. He’s been poked and prodded and shocked and, worse yet, talked at till he’s blue in the face, out there in that place.” The awful name now forever expelled from our conversation with his turn of phrase. “I got sick of it myself, and I was only visiting, the way they wanted to reduce everything to a couple of easy words about sex.” He paused, as if to consider. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I see things too simply.” He eased himself down, into the comfort and the darkness of our bed. “Who can know the heart of a man?” he whispered, and pulled the thin sheet up, over my shoulders and his, as was his habit before we went to sleep. “Especially a man like your brother.”

Later, Tom spoke out of the darkness. It was the middle of the night. He had gotten up for some reason—had the phone rung?—and now he was back in the room. Leaning over, his breath warm. He was whispering. Or crying. I came awake to realize he was crying. “It’s Tommy,” he was saying. Our Tommy.

Tommy’s drowned, he said. I could barely make out the words. He hadn’t put on the light. His head was heavy now against my shoulder. Drowned or driving, he was saying, drunk driving, I heard, and I heard myself say, “Oh God.” I got out of the bed, aware, in the darkness, of the heavy weight of him on the mattress. He was crying, speaking, They were bringing him home, he told me. Through the night. Bringing the body home, and I put my hands over my ears at the phrase. I would not hear it. I found myself in the living room where the dull streetlight came through the crisscross curtains in grays and whites. I had forgotten to draw the blinds last night, with that Matt Cain character here in the living room, and now there was a nightmarish tinge to the couch and the coffee table and the lamps, the family pictures on the walls, the sound of my own entreaties, which I might have been speaking out loud, wasn’t at all speaking out loud, Make this a dream, O God, too terrible, too cruel.

But it was the very cruelty of it that made me know it was real. Brutal and cruel, the way of all flesh. But to lose a child was the worst of it all. I fell to my knees. There was the smell of dust on the bare floor. I could hear Gabe coming down the stairs, sleepy and afraid. Good Lord, what’s wrong. I had my head to my knees, and from somewhere in the darkness I could hear the girls’ careening voices, asking, asking, but putting off with their questions the answer they feared to hear. Some general devastation. Don’t put on the light, I begged my brother as he came down the stairs. Tommy is dead. My child. They are bringing his body home through the night.

Good God, good God, he said.

There was wailing from the other rooms. The body was coming home, I heard someone say, and I put my hands to my ears. It was a terrible word, used this way. How could it be that I had never heard it before, the cruelty of it, the stupidity. Why hadn’t Mr. Fagin, in all his wisdom, banned the term. The body. Stuffed with horsehair. The child warm in my arms. How would I bear it?

Gabe pressed his hands to my ears. This can’t be real, I said. Tell me it’s not real, make it not real. I had him by the sleeve. I pulled at his sleeve. I said it to Gabe, but he was full of sympathy and utter helplessness. Impossible, I heard him whisper. He was crying. Weeping. Impossible, he said. I was alone. No one had turned on a light.

You could ask, I said. My throat ached. Ask.

I woke slowly to the darkness of the bedroom and the steady hum of the summer fan, which Tom had turned up during the night. I felt the ache in my throat that told me I had been crying in my sleep. The house was silent. Tom was snoring softly beside me. It took a few seconds for the dream’s grief to fall away, so real and terrible. I had had such dreams before. My throat still ached with how real it had been.

I wiped my wet cheek with the heel of my hand. It was the middle of a summer night and my husband was asleep beside me. It had been nothing more than a dream of disaster. Overanxious-mother dream of disaster. Fagin’s girl hearing in my dreams the long settled echo of other people’s grief. Plus dinner table talk of Tommy and Jimmy diving in and out of the salt ocean day after day, hung over and carefree.

Still, it was a terrible thing to say “the body.”

Still, I had asked and it had been given. His life restored.

Still, tonight I’d have Tom call the restaurant where both boys worked and tell them to get themselves home for dinner this week. “Your mother is worried,” Tom would say. He would know just how to put it, both joking and sincere: the women must be humored. “Come home and give your mother a chance to look at you.”

I sat up, reached for my glasses, stood. I walked out into the living room, where I saw I had indeed forgotten to close the blinds against the coming morning’s heat. The slatted streetlight was exactly as I had seen it just moments ago. I could smell the summer dust on the bare floors. And each of the family photos on the wall—professional portraits already looking dated, graduation pictures from a time already past—was stamped with the same distorting darkness I had seen in my dream. I paused at the foot of the stairs. The walls of the room were lit with lozenges of streetlight, long rectangles and a thin cross. From the bedroom upstairs I could hear my brother breathing in his dreamless sleep. I climbed slowly. When I reached the top of the stairs, where it was darker, I slid my bare feet cautiously along the floor, some intimation of how I must walk now, in my blindness.

I looked into the boys’ room, which was dimly lit by the streetlight, the two narrow beds neat and undisturbed, the scent of boy about it still, but tempered now with the warm breeze, the odor of the day’s heat against the roof. I looked into the second room, where Gabe slept, the windows opened, a night breeze stirring. Gabe was on his back, under a white sheet, his arm thrown over his eyes as he used to do. He was awake and he whispered into the darkness, “Marie?” as I entered the room.

“Are you all right?” I asked him, and he answered, “Fine. And yourself?” Which made me smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed, felt him move his long legs to accommodate me. “Bad dream,” I said, and recognized as I said it my own foolish certainty that it had not been a dream at all. I had asked and it had been given to me. Time had relented, doubled back on itself, restored what had been lost.

I saw my brother lower his arm, felt his hand move toward mine over the thin sheet. In the darkness, he lifted my own and held it. His palm was warm and broad. I felt the certainty of it, of his grip. I understood that he knew my dream. That he had felt me tugging at his sleeve.

On the nightstand beside the bed, reflecting the dim lamplight outside, there was a plain glass of water. Beside it, the white-capped prescription bottle Tom had brought home.

I asked him again if he would stay. “This is a nice room, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s always been a great place for guests. Momma stayed here a couple of times. When the kids were young.” I could see the way the streetlight caught in his eyes and on his teeth.

“I remember,” he said softly. He said, “That fellow who was here, Matt Cain, asked if I was interested in his place. He’s got a three-family out in Bay Ridge. The top floor’s available. I don’t know the neighborhood very well, but I told him I’d consider it.”

“You’ll be lonely out there,” I said. I said it abruptly, without thinking. “It will be a lonely life.”

I did not remember then that the phrase had been used for Bill Corrigan.

“That’s occurred to me, too,” Gabe said softly. He lifted my hand and dropped it down again. “I don’t know if that can be helped.” And then he added, “It won’t be like home”—meaning, I knew, everything that once was. And then he laughed a little. “Remember Momma in her last days? Not home, we had to tell her, but Brooklyn.”

I let go of his hand as I stood. “You’ll be at home here,” I told him.

He nodded, and then he once more lifted his wrist to his eyes. I lingered for a moment at the side of his bed. Without fear or forethought, without intention, not at that moment, I lifted the prescription bottle and slipped it into the pocket of my robe.

The staircase was darker than the rooms upstairs had been. I went down the stairs slowly, carefully, one hand on the banister, one on the wall, walking with the caution of my blind old age.

I might have saved my brother’s life that night. I don’t know. I might only have dreamed the loss of my first child.

I went down the stairs carefully in the dark, one hand on the banister, one hand on the wall. What light came from the lampposts outside the living-room window was pooled at the bottom of the stairs. I thought of Pegeen Chehab and her last fall. And then of the distance her parents had traveled to bring her to her brief life, sands of Syria and Mount Lebanon and the slick floor of the pitching ship, and then that brief flame in the parlor floor window.

On the day before she died, Pegeen leaned down to me, her eyes sparkling with her plan. She said, If I see him, I’ll get real close. I’ll pretend to fall, see, and he’ll catch me and say, Is it you again? Someone nice.

She told me, poor sparrow, poor fool, We’ll see what happens then.