There was a sudden silence in Mrs. Fagin’s room. I was aware of the women touching teacups to their saucers, or folding and unfolding their hands.
Not that there was a drop of resentment in Margaret Tuohy, one of the nuns said softly. Simple soul that she was. She knew her brother was an important and holy man, busy with the Lord’s work.
Certainly, another said.
I felt their glances touching me from here and there. I felt them exchanging, through their glances, some communication with one another. I became aware of how rapturous I had been just moments before, describing the bishop’s visit, his clean hands, the lovely clothes he had sent. They were warning one another, I could tell, not to infect my awe of the man with their own clear-eyed assessment.
I said into their silence, “It was really a gorgeous suit. A blue like I’ve never seen. It must have cost a fortune.” Siding, I knew, with the elegant bishop and his handsome secretary.
The ladies murmured their responses, Oh, sure, no doubt, allowing me, I could tell, my right to be taken in.
But then little Mrs. Fagin, her feet barely touching the sunlit floor, raised her white eyebrows and smiled and crooned over her teacup, her brogue, I am certain, kicked up a notch, “Saks Fifth Avenue no less.”
The words put a stake through the heart of the bishop’s pretensions, and my own. In truth, Miss Tuohy’s body in its coffin had looked a bit lost in the blue silk of the suit. Her brother couldn’t have known, Fagin said, how her last illness had whittled her body to bone.
I bowed my head to take a sip of the cold, sweet tea, and when I looked up again, they were all smiling at me with their clear eyes, gracious and sorrowful and forgiving. Gently sorry, as was their way, for the silly child I was and perhaps would always be, enchanted by baubles, taken in by fools.
Of course, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the bishop’s sister’s fate and my own. Walking down Fagin’s dark staircase that afternoon, I imagined what the ladies in Mrs. Fagin’s living room would have to say about me were I to lose my footing à la Pegeen Chehab and fall fatally down the stairs. I suspected my poorr father would be mentioned (there would be the gesture of a raised glass), my poorr mother, yet another widow in her top-floor aviary (the rubbing, perhaps, of finger and thumb). I wondered if any of the ladies gathered upstairs had ever seen me walking out with Walter Hartnett.
But it was Gabe, I knew, who would give my brief life story the kind of turn that made the ladies lean forward … a handsome boy, his parents’ pride, and only a year at his first parish before he came back home without his collar. A mystery. I imagined them all—tiny Mrs. Fagin and her lace-curtain friends, the Sisters in their wimples or their caps—raising their eyebrows and letting their words fall off into that long nod … though I couldn’t say then what it might have meant.
I could not have said then if Gabe’s history added scandal to my own, or merely some pity. But I was certain they would know, the ladies in Fagin’s upper room. They would know the clear-eyed truth of it. And they would know as well how to choose their words to tell a kinder tale.
And then, of course, inevitably, given the size of the parish and Fagin’s steady business there, Walter Hartnett walked through the funeral parlor door.
It was at Bill Corrigan’s wake. It was one of the long winters during the war.
Only the week before, I had come up from the subway on a wet but warm Saturday evening after a day of spitting rain. It was the gulley of water at the curb that gave the first hint of something wrong. I had been downtown shopping all day, seeing Muriel at A&S and meeting Gerty and Durna for lunch. We had sat by the window in the restaurant, we had been in and out of the stores. It had not rained very hard downtown that day, and yet there was a river rush of water along the dark curb when I got out of the subway. When I turned the corner of my own street, I saw the fire truck under the streetlights. The firemen were still putting away their black hoses as I approached, and there were small knots of people still gathered on the sidewalk here and there. There were windows open in Bill Corrigan’s building, thin, pale curtains waved out from some of them. The first group I came to was made up of poor Mr. and Mrs. Chehab and some other neighbors, as well as Mrs. Shapiro, the landlady who lived on our parlor floor. I had the impression they’d been outside a long time, the way they huddled, and shivered. All the women had wrapped themselves in their own arms, holding their sweaters and coats tightly around their chests, grasping their own forearms and shoulders with hands made pale by the streetlight.
“It’s Bill,” Mrs. Shapiro said as I approached, hushed and astonished. “He put his head in the oven,” she said. “While his mother was out. Killed himself with the gas.”
Tall Mrs. Chehab looked down at me with her mouth closed tightly over her teeth and her eyes wide.
“There was a little explosion, I guess,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, “when they forced open the door. Stupid.” She touched her forehead. “The super couldn’t see, so he lit a match. The dope.”
“Idiot,” Mr. Chehab said angrily.
“He didn’t know,” another woman said.
“An explosion and a fire,” Mrs. Shapiro said again. She was a thin and wiry woman with a worn face. “They got the fire out pretty quickly. They just took the body away.” As she spoke, the fire truck, popping and wheezing, began to move.
Across the street a group of women were gathered around the steps of the house beside the Corrigans’. Old Mrs. Corrigan, in her hat and her coat as if she had just come home, was in the midst of them, sitting like a child on the stoop. A large woman sat beside her. Another, Mrs. Lee from the candy store, was crouching at her feet. My mother was there, too, leaning toward the old woman, who was shaking her head and beating her fist against her lap, a keening gesture I had come to know very well. There was a taste of the fire engine’s fuel in the wet air and, less precise, the taste of scorched wood. I could hear Mrs. Corrigan’s sobs from where I stood, and the women’s whispered urging to come inside, out of the cold and the damp. Mr. Chehab was saying in his gentle lilt, “Why in the world would he do such a thing? Why in the world?”
At my shoulder, Mrs. Shapiro held herself more tightly and shook her head and pinched her nostrils.
“It was a lonely life for him,” she said, finishing the tale.
Because this was one of the long winters during the war, the boys grown to men who had known Bill Corrigan for most of their lives were mostly elsewhere now, fighting. Gabe himself was at an air base in England. Bill Corrigan’s wake, then, was filled with the older people from the neighborhood, and the neighborhood girls like me, but few enough of the stickball kids who had first made him their umpire, their seer and their sage. Despite this, his mother, who I learned had for family only a sister and a niece from Greenpoint, wanted the three full days of viewing.
Because he had taken his life by his own hand, Bill Corrigan would have no funeral Mass at Mary Star of the Sea, and he could not be buried in Gate of Heaven, where his father and an infant brother lay. Although Mr. Fagin had turned away suicides before, Catholic suicides—no need to get on the wrong side of the Church—he reasoned that this three-day wake was all that Mrs. Corrigan would have, and he gave her the whole affair, coffin and all, gratis, in sympathy.
Bill was a veteran, after all, Mr. Fagin told me. He might have had a good life if he hadn’t gone over. It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is. There should be some accommodation for that fact, he said. Some bending. He struck his desk with his big hand.