He may have laughed a little, and his amusement was suddenly more infuriating to me than his censure. I looked up at him and said, “Go get yourself married, momma’s boy. Go marry Agnes”—and said her name the way a streetwise, mocking child might say it, the kind of child I had never been—“then you can tell me what to do.”
Gabe pursed his lips and his face was suddenly regretful, as if the harsh words had been his own. He dropped his hands from my shoulders, held them out as if to show me they were empty. “Some vows can’t be broken,” he said evenly.
I had to look away. I understood how firmly he believed this, but I muttered, “Nonsense,” anyway. It was all a tangle, my brother’s faith, his vocation, his vows, his failure, and it only made me impatient to think of it, after such a lovely night. I wished he could be a simpler kind of man.
I stamped my foot again. “Apologize,” I demanded.
He stepped away. I did not look up. I could hear the dawn birds, pigeons and sparrows, at the kitchen window. There was more early sunlight still across the carpet roses. I saw how the light touched his long feet in their slippers, the pale flesh of his insteps, as white as marble.
“All right,” I heard him whisper above my head. “I’m sorry. I suppose I didn’t put it very well.” He stepped back farther still. “I’m only thinking of your welfare,” he said. “I’m here to be your guide.”
I put the fragrant handkerchief to my nose. The long-faced Rorys of the world, sweet as they might be, would have their work cut out for them, trying to hold a candle to this earnest brother of mine.
I raised my eyes, to his neat pajamas and the brown flannel robe crossed over his chest, and then to the pale flesh of his throat. I felt some sudden tenderness: instep and throat, were there any places on a body more vulnerable and sad? Had I said he was lonely?
He whispered, “None of us knows the hour, Marie. Surely you understand this by now, with all your time at Fagin’s.” And I shifted my weight again. “It’s as simple as this,” he said. “I don’t want you ever to be in a state of sin. Not for a moment. I don’t want any of us to run that risk. I want us to be together in eternity. The way we once were.” And I saw him make some gesture toward the dining-room table and its white cloth and the simple chandelier, all of it looking distant and colorless now in the early-morning light. “All of us together again, the way we used to be. Dad with us again.”
And I suddenly held up my hand: he would have me blubbering. “Stop it,” I said, so firmly he took a step back. It was as if I could hear his teeth snap closed. “You’ve said enough,” I told him.
Before he left the room, he showed me the blanket and the pillow he’d placed on what we called the lady chair in the corner. “Sleep on the couch,” he said. “You’ll surely wake Momma if you go in there now. I’ll tell her you came home,” and he looked at his watch again, raising his pale eyebrows, “much earlier.”
I nodded. But I was still angry or indignant or sorry or embarrassed enough to refuse the kindness. And the light was not so dim in his corner of the room that I failed to see how this disappointed him. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He aimed for a jollier tone. “Fools’ thoughts are in their mouths, the Bible says. A wise man keeps his words in his heart.”
I turned my back to him. I had learned at Fagin’s just how to hold myself aloof whenever someone else’s sorrow threatened to send me sprawling. “Yeah, well,” I said coolly, “not everything’s in a book.”
I heard him say, “No doubt.” He said, “Pray for me, anyway, will you?” reminding me—how quickly I had forgotten it—that he was going to enlist. I had to shift my weight once again. And then he turned to the short hallway that led back to my mother’s bedroom and, beyond it, the room we once had shared.
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind,” Mr. Fagin said early in my tenure, “every once in a while, when things are quiet here, to go up and have a word with my mother.”
The third-floor apartment was all Irish lace: lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses, and a lace handkerchief in her pale hands. She was a tiny old woman with a small, pale, pretty face. The apartment was as neat as a pin, and there were always small vases of rearranged funeral flowers on the mantel and the windowsills, on the sideboard and the tea table.
I never found Mrs. Fagin alone, which was surprising, since I so seldom caught sight of her visitors coming in. But every time I climbed the stairs and knocked gently at the apartment door, I heard from behind it the energetic scuffle of another visitor. There would be tea and cake already set out, or a light lunch, or a kettle already whistling in the kitchen. An old Sister of Charity in her pioneer cap would be there, or one of the nursing sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, often both. Other old immigrant ladies of all shapes and sizes stepping out of the kitchen, bringing in another chair. Mrs. Fagin always sat in the middle of the high-backed couch, her little feet in black shoes barely touching the floor. She always threw up her hands in delight when I entered the room and touched the space beside her and said something charming and lyrical, “You’re as welcome as the flowers in May” or “Here’s a sight for sore eyes.”
The nuns had to turn their heads to smile at me from within their caps and wimples. I often had the impression that I had just interrupted a long, whispered story one of them was telling. They always seemed to me to be just leaning back. There always seemed to me to be a silenced breath hanging on the air. “God love you,” Mrs. Fagin would say as I came into the neat room. “You’ve just brightened our day.” Although there was no denying, as I came into the lacy, sun-washed room, that their day had already been going along quite brightly.
I sat beside Mrs. Fagin on the stiff couch, or if another old woman or one of the older Sisters was already there, I’d take a single chair. “Now,” Mrs. Fagin would say when I had my cup, “what’s going on downstairs?”
I would name for her whoever was being waked that evening, or whose family had called that morning to inquire about Fagin’s services, or whose body had arrived from the morgue and was currently being prepared. The old lady would cock her head at each name. She had bright blue eyes and pure white hair. Like her son, she might once have been a redhead. “Oh yes,” she’d say if she knew them, or if the name didn’t ring a bell, she would look to the other women in the room until she found the one who could say, “Oh, sure,” and fill her in on the deceased’s pedigree. “That’s Bridget Verde’s niece’s girl,” they might say. Or, “Tommy Cute’s a friend of his,” or—this mostly from the nursing sisters, who, it seemed, at one point or other had had most of the bodies that came into Fagin’s in their care—“a slow death there,” or “a weak heart,” or “His mother, too, died the same way.” When all else failed, one of them would fetch the paper and look for an obituary.
Recollections were raised, sorted, compiled. If there was a good story attached to the life of the dead, whatever woman among them had it would be given the floor, and whatever part of the story was deemed, perhaps, too delicate for the old lady’s ears (or, more likely, mine) would be acted out with a series of gestures and nods and sudden silences that I quickly came to be able to interpret as readily as the rest. A finger held to the side of a nose indicated a deception, a pantomimed bottle raised to the mouth meant there was a problem with drink, the rubbing of thumb and forefinger meant money problems (usually because someone, most likely a spouse, was cheap), eyebrows raised and words falling off into a long nod indicated sex (“and he was coming home every night while she was still losing blood and …”)—eyebrows, nod, and all the other women would cluck their tongues in sympathy.