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.”