I had been here three years before, for my father’s funeral luncheon, but this was not yet something I could say without my voice breaking.
I put my glasses back on and said, “Pretty suit.”
He held out his arms. “You like it?” He grinned. He was an ordinary-looking boy with brown hair and somewhat remarkable gray eyes. But handsome today in the suit, the white shirt, and pale tie. He had small straight teeth. Nice ears. “I borrowed it from a buddy of mine,” he said, “cause I’m on my way up to Judge Sweeney’s summer place for the weekend.”
I leaned my gloved hands against the table edge, pressed the buttons of my shirtwaist against them. “Whatever for?” I said.
His eyes skimmed over mine and then bounced away to follow the rise and fall of his napkin as he shook it out. “Looks like me and Rita Sweeney are getting married,” he said, and tucked the napkin onto his lap.
It was surely an image from a children’s cartoon, maybe from one I had seen in the movies, with Walter or with someone else, but in my recollection of that hour, I saw the tears flow freely from my eyes and fill up behind my glasses like water in two fishbowls. Because I knew I cried, and yet no tear fell.
It wasn’t just that Rita’s family had some money, he explained while he ate and the food he had ordered for me sat untouched on my plate. Although she was better off than the two of us, with our two widowed mothers ending up alone in their top-floor aviaries if we got married. It was simply that Rita was better-looking, really. No flaws that he could see. Not, he said, like you and me.
“Blind you,” he said. “Gimpy me.”
He said, as the lunch wore on, “Don’t kid yourself that everybody’s equal in this country. It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.”
He said, “I’m giving my future children the best chance I can give them. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t?”
The tears rocked like the sea behind my glasses.
He said, “You’ve been swell. I wanted to give you a nice lunch.”
I walked back to the subway with the tears that were trapped under my glasses washing up over my eyes. Through them, I saw the buildings and the streetlamps and the cars with their bright windshields, even the dark slips of other people, grow buoyant. I saw them float past, clashing and bobbing, unmoored by the flood.
At home, I climbed the steps, and everything that was terrible about this house and this street, about my life thus far, washed before my eyes: Here was the turn in the stair where Fagin’s men had struggled with my father’s coffin. Here was the couch where I had found my mother one morning last year, counting the pile of wrinkled dollars in her lap, hollow-eyed and sleepless. Here was the bed that had once belonged to my parents but that now my mother and I shared because Gabe had lost his vocation.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of my spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.
The door to the second bedroom opened and my brother appeared, his breviary in his hand. He wore the pants of the seersucker suit he’d had on this morning when he left for work, but he’d taken off his jacket and tie. His collar was unbuttoned and his hair was askew—anyone else would have thought he’d been sleeping—and there was an uncharacteristic stoop to his shoulders, as if he were prepared for some blow. “My Lord,” he said, “what is it?”
Apparently I’d been crying all along.
Standing in the doorway of the bedroom we once shared, he listened to the tale of my woe with his finger still marking his place in the breviary, the book held against his heart. I had not expected to find him home. His office had closed early, he told me, because of the heat.
He stood there, motionless in the doorway, the book pressed to his chest, while I recounted some version of what it was that had broken my heart. When I paused, gulping and whimpering, he said simply, “Wash your face. I’ll get my hat.”
In my despair, I only obeyed. Walked listlessly through the living room to the bath, my arms at my side. I threw cold water on my face. When I emerged, Gabe was waiting. He had put on his hat and his tie and his suit jacket. He said, “It is solved by walking,” and opened the door.
He did not take my hand. Or offer his arm. We walked down the stairs together without touching, like children. He pulled open the vestibule door for me, and then the outside door. We went down the brown steps together, and on the sidewalk he slipped his hands into his pockets and nodded that we should go to the right. I went along. It was a hot day. I had forgotten how hot, because earlier, when I’d left for the restaurant, I had just bathed and splashed myself with cologne, and later when I returned, the heat was only a part of the general devastation.
But now the asphalt was as hot as a griddle. The air had thickened with the heat. Across the street, blind Bill Corrigan’s kitchen chair had been set out, but it was empty. There were only a few children on stoops. They sat on the higher steps, close to their buildings, where there was some shade. They looked limp and malnourished. I glanced up at them and then glanced down. The sun on the brim of my hat was a weight that threatened to bow my head. The hot concrete made the soles of my new shoes pliant and sticky.
The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief.
Even in this heat, there was the smell of industrial smoke in the thick air.
My brother walked beside me. His suit jacket was buttoned and his tie was tight, but his hands were in his pockets, and this made his stride seem leisurely. He paused at the first corner and then shrugged a little, turned left across the street. Soon enough I saw that he didn’t really have a destination in mind—he paused at each corner, turned arbitrarily, put out his hand to make me wait for the traffic to pass—which was fine with me; I might as well do this, walk like this, as anything else. I’d had a brief fear, when I first saw him with his jacket on, and his tie, that he was going to take me to church.
On the next block, a young man stopped right in front of us, pulled off his hat, and swabbed his high forehead with a white handkerchief as large as a flag. He was slipping his hat back on as we passed him. I heard him say, “Father,” and then, “Father Gabe?”
My brother turned and greeted the man, whose friendly eyes seem to stagger for a moment, going to Gabe’s throat, and then to me. He was short, with a round, boyish face that was florid with the heat. His shirt and pale suit were stained with sweat, his wide blue tie looked as if it had been soaked in water, wrung out, and then returned to his neck. He lifted his hat again as I was introduced, and I saw that his hatband had left a red impression across his broad forehead. Tom Commeford. He said, “How are you, Father,” and my brother held up his hand.