And he smiled at me with his beautiful teeth. “I’ll just say a quick hello.”
Climbing the stairs behind me, he said, jovially, “Your mother’s not Italian, is she?” And I paused at the first landing to look back at him. Under the brim of his fedora, his face was flushed. He seemed a little breathless. “I only know Italian girls named Marie,” he said, his hand on the banister, his voice trailing.
What the question revealed was that he had been thinking of my name as we climbed the stairs: not of the state of the apartment house, which was looking, I thought, a little shabby under the care of a new landlord, or the shape of my rump, or the lateness of the hour, or even of the possibility of a drink being offered once we got upstairs, but of me, my name. Four steps below me when we paused, he now doffed his hat, his face raised to mine, and it was the same sudden panic that had entered his eyes when, back on that summer day, he had misspoken again, called my brother Father again. “Was that a rude question?” he said softly, a history of his own social failings, or, perhaps, of his own failed offers of affection and friendship now in his voice. He shifted his feet. “I don’t have anything against Italians,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. He smiled at me, still uncertain, still in the dark, but grateful to follow my lead. “It’s George M. Cohan,” I said.
He said, “Ah,” and nodded, as if he understood precisely what I meant, but the pretense lasted hardly a moment. His face fell again. He was, perhaps, incapable of deception. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“Don’t you know the song?” I asked him. It was as if all his uncertainty had given me permission to be assured. I hummed a little. “ ‘But with propriety, society will say Marie.’ The way my father told it, I was going to be Mary until my mother heard that line and decided society and propriety were really what she was after—’Blessed Virgin Mary, stand aside’—as my father said.”
And I made note, obliquely, that my voice did not catch, no foolish tears. I suddenly felt peculiarly happy, although the drinks at the party had been well watered. “So, no, not Italian,” I said, a little more kindly than before. I smiled down at this poor young guy, shrunken inside his clothes. “Just lace-curtain pretension,” I said. “Both my parents were Irish born.”
The delight, and the relief, on his face made me laugh again. “No kidding,” he said. “Mine, too. What a coincidence.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Some coincidence. Two New Yorkers with Irish parents.” And began to climb again.
“Not that I knew them,” he said from behind me. “My Irish parents. I’m a foundling-home kid, truth be told.”
Once more I paused on the stair to look at him. I wondered suddenly if it was childhood neglect that had shaped him, not the war at all. But he was smiling. “It’s not a sad tale,” he said. “I never knew them. My parents. They were actors. Vaudeville. My mother was a beauty with a voice like an angel. My father was a dancing man. They left me at a rooming house on Tenth Avenue and continued on their tour.”
“That’s awful,” I said, and he shook his head. “There were at least six other kids I knew growing up who had been told the same story. Vaudeville, voice like an angel, Tenth Avenue, and all. I think half the nuns who ran the place were former chorus girls.” He grinned.
“Were you never adopted?” I asked. There was the tug of sympathy, but also some wariness, I must admit. I had read far enough into David Copperfield by then to know a hard-luck childhood could portend a hard-luck life.
“We were only a few days from getting on a train, to be sent out West,” he said. “Me and some buddies. I was nearly ten. I might have ended up some kind of farmer in the Wild West—can you imagine me in a ten-gallon hat?—but Sister Saviour—now there’s a name—held me back. She had a widowed sister in East New York who had just lost a son, older than me, her only child. A teenager. Poor kid drowned out in Rockaway. So I went out and lived with her. She had a very nice place. Very clean.” He grinned again.
“That couldn’t have been easy,” I said. Standing above him just those few steps made me feel taller and wiser. Even in the ugly light of the stairway, he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child’s.
He shook his head. “She was a very nice lady. Very refined. God rest her soul. I got no complaints there.”
We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit—the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more likely his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.
At the door of the apartment he said, “I’ll just have a few words and be on my way. I won’t wear out my welcome.” He said, as I opened the door, “Just a quick hello.”
But he was not, I was learning, a man of a single word—of any single word. I placed him on the couch in the living room and walked quietly through the darkened bedroom where my mother was asleep. I knocked on Gabe’s door and whispered Tom Commeford’s name. He looked up from his book and frowned. “One of the brewery guys,” I said.
When Gabe walked out into the light of the living room, it was clear that he did indeed remember the man. “What do you know,” he said, pointing at him, then offering his hand.
“Small world,” Tom said, and swept his hand across the air, as if to indicate the narrow room itself. “After all these years.”
I told them both to sit at the table while I put the kettle on. And it was the smell of the toast I thought to make for them, burning under the broiler, that brought my mother out of the bedroom in her robe and her long braid, and gave Gabe the opportunity to tell Tom, “My sister’s helpless in the kitchen. Fair warning.”
It was a kind of party, then: the three of us at the dining-room table while my mother made tea and toast and—“Well, yes, thank you, if it’s not too much trouble”—fried some eggs and some slices of ham, as if she recognized, too, in the first moments of their introduction, how little substance this stranger had under his suit.
She placed it all on a warmed platter, eggs, ham, toast, while I set the table.
The two men compared their years in the war. They had both been in England, at two different air bases, although Tom had flown, Gabe had not. There was much back and forth between the two of them as my mother and I listened. Tom had been a radio operator, he said, and with a mouth full of toast and egg, he casually revealed that he’d spent seven months in a German POW camp near the Baltic. He shrugged, glanced at me apologetically when I said, “My goodness.” The food there didn’t much agree with him, he said—you’d never catch him eating another rutabaga—but the company was good. He smiled at us with his small teeth. “Roll call twice a day, but after that, not much to do. Terrible boredom.”
He painted pictures there, he told us. A way to pass the time. A Red Cross package had arrived with watercolors. One guy was talented. He gave the others lessons. Only Tom stuck with them. Everything he drew was lopsided somehow, but he liked doing it.
Suddenly he reached into his suit jacket and extracted a small tobacco tin. He pressed it against his tie as he pried it open, his hands pale and childish, except for a silver pinky ring, which told me there was some vanity here. There was only a thickly folded piece of paper inside the tin. He took it out and opened it up, smoothing it out on the white tablecloth before passing it across the table to me. All three of us leaned forward to see. “That’s the barracks,” he said softly, apologetically. “Not very good,” he offered.