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.