I waited for my mother to turn off the running water. I wanted only to say to that broad back, to those sure hips, The man Dora Ryan married was not a man at all, only so my mother could say, Nonsense, as was her way, and thus restore the world. But my mother turned from the sink with the rough towel to her face and seemed surprised to see me there. “Ah, Marie,” she said, looking over it, and would later apologize that she did not have the wherewithal, at that moment, to break the news more gently. “Poor Gerty’s lost her mother. Fagin’s girl told me. She passed away this morning. In agony,” she added. “God give her peace.”
There was only one small narrow window in this bathroom, high up in the tiled wall, and it faced only the airshaft, but the light through it caught my mother’s face nonetheless. There were no tears in her eyes, and only a few wet strands of hair at her broad forehead, plastered to her cheeks. She began to dry her hands on the towel, in her own efficient, getting-on-with-it way. “A little girl,” my mother was saying. “A sister for Gerty. They’re calling her Durna.”
My mother said, folding the towel neatly, returning it to the bar, “It was late in her life to be having another child.” She said, “There’s a woman over on Joralemon, above the bakery. She might have helped the poor soul. If only she had asked.”
Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, I was aware of the vertigo I’d known when I was younger, when the reflected bathwater swung me high and shook me out and rattled the teeth in my head. Suddenly I held up my arms to my mother. I heard her cluck her tongue—either at the pity of Mrs. Hanson’s death or the childishness of my pose, perhaps both—before she crossed the narrow space between us and took me into an embrace.
I faked a stomachache to avoid Mrs. Hanson’s wake. Said I’d caught “the grippe” from my father. My fear was that when I saw Gerty again she would resemble the neglected kids at school—kids with musty hair and black fingernails, with fallen hems and caramel-colored plugs of wax in their ears. But Gerty wore a new plaid coat and a new plaid tam-o’-shanter to her mother’s funeral at Mary Star of the Sea, and when I once again climbed the stairs to knock at her door—grateful to discover that there was no fat woman in the hallway—she smiled to see me. Gerty smiled. Her teeth were still widely spaced, her freckles still vivid across her nose, her wild hair combed as neatly as it had ever been, her curls still thick and tightly woven. She put her hand to my elbow. An older woman in dark clothes stepped out of the kitchen to see who it was, but then stepped back in again.
“Come see Durna,” Gerty said.
We went around the polished dining-room suite and into her parents’ bedroom, where I had been before only to say the Rosary. It was filled with a curtain-diffused light. There was a white bassinet at the foot of the bed. The wallpaper was a close and crowded design of roses and green vines, and there were embroidered roses scattered across the bedspread. There was a tall brown dresser against one wall, Mr. Hanson’s doorman’s cap on top of it and, between the two windows, a dressing table with perfume bottles and jars of cream and a silver-backed brush still threaded with Mrs. Hanson’s black hair. The windows here were opened behind the curtains, and sunlight, as well as the metallic odor of sunlit air, filled the room. There was the sound of cars, of people passing by in the street. Gerty took my hand. Together we approached the little bed and peered in. The baby was fair-haired, only a hint of gold across her crown, and red-cheeked, with plump fingers and a mouth like two tiny rose petals, lips the color of a pink rose.
The baby startled awake when I bumped the bassinet, and her eyes were deep blue, instantly serene. Lashes pale as wheat. She waved her arms. Her wrists and her little hands were fat and dimpled. And then a toothless smile, all for me, I thought, although Gerty, newly minted expert, whispered that it was only gas. There was sunlight pouring into the room. The windows were wide open, but there was no breeze, only the sounds of cars and carts and of some children in the street. When the baby began to fuss, Gerty reached into the bassinet and lifted her, the blanket trailing. She held her on her shoulder, ran her fingertips up and down her spine, as adept as any adult. And then Gerty scooted the quieted child into the crook of her arm. She put her lips to the pretty forehead.
I felt such a rush of envy then—to be Gerty, to have such a lovely baby in my own care—that I shivered with the thought, well knowing that I had walked upon my mother’s grave.
From the kitchen came the sound of a teakettle whistling and, behind it, the rattle of baby bottles clinking in a pot of boiling water. I could hear the lady in the kitchen muttering to herself, shutting the icebox, slamming the oven door. I caught the first scent of baking bread.
Mrs. Hanson would never again be found in these rooms. Or seen waiting for Gerty outside the fence at school. Or met at the grocery, or in the crowds after Mass. Her comb and brush were here, the crystal bottles of her perfume, her children and her husband were here, this lovely baby, but she had vanished forever. And although the day would come when Gerty, sitting beside me on our stoop, would suddenly bow her head to her knees and weep without sound or explanation for what seemed the better part of an hour, at that moment, in the pretty room, with the lovely baby in Gerty’s arms, I believed only that the bright, bustling world had simply closed itself up over Mrs. Hanson’s disappearance, and that this, then, was the way of all sorrow—Gerty’s and the Chehabs’ and perhaps even Dora Ryan’s, once she found someone else—closed up, forgotten, vanished in the wink of an eye.
In her own last days, my mother asked, on waking, “Am I home?” Because she didn’t want to be in Ireland, but in her last days every good bit of sleep she managed to get seemed to return her to that dreaded shore. “Am I home?” she would ask, tears standing in her rheumy eyes.
In the first days of her last illness we said, “Yes,” Gabe and I and Gabe’s friend Agnes, who was helping out—even the visiting nurses who stopped by—but when we saw how this distressed her, how she plucked at the sheet and turned her head away, we began to understand and we amended our reply. “No,” we said, to reassure her. “Not home. Here. In Brooklyn.”
Once, she said, “Show me.”
I had already drawn back the bedroom curtain and raised the shade. Now, with one knee on the window seat, I struggled to open the old window in the overpainted frame. I banged at it with the heel of my palm, cursing under my breath, until my brother, who was sitting in the dining-room chair he had drawn up to the side of the bed, looked up impatiently to ask if I’d like some help.
I pushed the window open, the sound of the street, the odor of the street, suddenly, almost visibly, slipping into the room, climbing the walls, crossing the ceiling, and drifting down across the bed. The odor of car exhaust and heated asphalt, of garbage and incinerator fires. “There,” I said. “Smells like Brooklyn.”
There was an argument going on out in the street, voices of children mostly, cursing and shouting, tinny music from a radio somewhere. “Sounds like Brooklyn, too,” I said, and saw Gabe glance at me from across our mother’s bed.
The neighborhood was in decline, the building itself much neglected. Gabe and my mother now slept with lights on in all the rooms, just to keep the roaches at bay. I had it from Agnes that when the parlor-floor apartment was broken into and ransacked—drugs were involved—one of the cops who came to the door asked my brother why he was still here, why he didn’t take my mother to a better neighborhood. To Jersey or Long Island.