Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father’s shout of laughter when my brother asked him, “Who is?”
They called me “our little pagan” after that, whenever their pride in my brother’s saintliness was in need of some deflating. Self-deflating, as was their way. When the priest from St. Francis came to say there was clearly a vocation. When the letter from the seminary arrived.
“We’re not so enamored of the priesthood as some,” my mother said, washing the dishes after the priest had come for tea, blushing with pride, but also holding her lips in such a way that made it clear she was not going to go overboard—as she would have put it—with her delight in Gabe’s success. There were just as many men in rectories, she said, who were vain or lazy or stupid as there were in the general population.
“One bishop,” my father joked, his hand to the top of my head, “and one little pagan. We’ve run the gamut in just these two.”
I climbed the staircase of Gertrude Hanson’s house, my hand on the wide banister. The carpet here was threadbare and there was the familiar odor of dust in the air. What light there was came through the transom above the entrance or filtered down in a single yellow shaft from the dirty skylight four stories up. Gertrude Hanson’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on the heavy door. The corridor was warm and airless. I heard Mrs. Hanson’s voice inside, laughing, and I rose up on my toes.
“Come in, Marie,” Mrs. Hanson called. “We know it’s you.”
Because this was the Saturday-morning routine, Gerty and I being even then the best of best friends. I opened the door and leaned in.
The Hansons’ front room was crowded with furniture: the great black dining-room table, eight chairs with tapestry seats, a heavy sideboard, a tea cart, a china cabinet with bowed glass—indication, in those days, of a family’s propriety and prosperity. Twice in my recollection I had arrived at Gerty’s on a Saturday morning and been startled to find the front room starkly empty, only the lamps still there, the good dishes and the tea set piled in a corner on the bare floor. “Repossessed” was the word Gerty used with an easy shrug. But on this morning it was all solidly in place, and beyond it I could see Mrs. Hanson in a wide chair just outside the kitchen entry, her bare feet on a plump hassock, her hands beckoning. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Come in and take this poor child out into the fresh air. She’s been cooking all morning.”
Mrs. Hanson had always been fleshy, with thick wrists and a broad, round face, but now with her fifth child on the way she was huge in her chair, her feet and ankles swollen, her stomach straining against the flannel of what had been her husband’s dressing gown. She had tucked a handkerchief into the collar of the robe, and the bit of lace at its edge, caught between her full breasts, made her look like a woman in an old painting. As if she were a woman in an old painting, she wore her black hair partially pinned up, partially fallen over her shoulders. There was a moist gleam to her white skin, her cheeks and her forehead and her bare arms, as if they reflected some particular light. It occurred to me as I shyly approached that Mrs. Hanson was as beautiful as a woman in a painting, what with her size and her abundance, abundance of breast and hair and damp flesh, of face and feature: big dark eyes and bright teeth and wide, laughing mouth.
“You girls run out and play,” Mrs. Hanson said. She stroked her hard belly. “Fatty Arbuckle and I will take a little snooze.”
In the small square kitchen, Gerty was drying her hands. She wore a calico apron with the strings wrapped two or three times around her tiny midriff and the hem falling well below her knees. There was the rich odor of her morning’s work, which was displayed on the windowsill and on a small table in the corner: a golden chicken that she was just now covering with a clean tea towel, a bowl of white potatoes mixed with celery and parsley, a homely pie, the tinges of the fork that had pierced its pale crust inexpertly spaced, perhaps, but showing anyway, here and there, a golden starburst of juice.
Gerty was boyish and matter-of-fact, easily the smartest girl in class, but also small like me and gap-toothed and thoroughly freckled. She merely shrugged when I whistled my astonishment. “You cooked all this?”
“She’s just learning,” Mrs. Hanson said. “But she’s got the knack. She’ll be a great little cook someday. She’ll be a great little mother while I’m away.”
Mrs. Hanson had a brogue that made her gulp air—a kind of quiet hiccup that swallowed the end of every sentence. It made her sound as if she were always on the breathless verge of astonishment, or laughter. “It’ll be like dining at the Waldorf,” she said.
Gerty took off her apron and hung it on the old gas jet by the door. A year ago, her poor head had been shaved for lice, but now her dark curls were as thick and wavy as a dried mop. She asked her mother if we could have money for a soda, considering how hard she had been working. Her mother laughed again and sent Gerty to the bedroom for her purse. Alone together for just that moment, Mrs. Hanson reached out and caught my wrist and then drew in her breath with another great gulp. Her legs on the hassock recoiled as the dark blood rose to her face and then just as suddenly drained away. “My dear,” she whispered. She tugged me closer. I leaned over the thick arm of the chair. Mrs. Hanson smelled of wholesome things, sunshine and oatmeal and yeast, her breath as she gasped was warm and sweet. “If you’ll take Gerty around the corner,” she said, “you’ll just catch Dora Ryan going off to church. Go see. Then have a soda. Keep her out, dear. Keep her out till suppertime.” She gulped another bit of breath. “Do that for me.”
I turned my head only slightly. I could feel the woman’s breath on my face, see the mottled pearl of her teeth. All unaccountably—unless, of course, you count the woman’s abundant beauty, the warmth of the small room, the good smells and the laughter and the fresh news that there was a wedding to see today—I suddenly threw my arms around Mrs. Hanson’s neck and pressed my lips to the woman’s damp and lovely cheek.
“My dear,” Mrs. Hanson said, and touched my back. “Dearie, dearie,” she said. And then Gerty returned from the bedroom with the coins in her hand and cried, “What about me?” and skipped to the other side of her mother’s chair, aiming her lips, too, toward the woman’s face. Suddenly we were both covering Mrs. Hanson with kisses, cheeks, eyebrows, nose, and the corner of her laughing mouth. She embraced us both and we leaned upon the hard belly to keep from falling into each other across her knees. “You’ll smother me,” Mrs. Hanson was saying, and we caught even her dry teeth with our lips. “You’ll have to call Fagin,” she cried, as if with her last breath. “I’ll be killed with affection.” We now had our hands tangled up in Mrs. Hanson’s thick hair. It was silky, but more substantial than silk, and we both lifted strands of it to our mouths. Laughing, Mrs. Hanson pushed us upright. “One of you in my lap is quite enough,” she said, catching her breath, the deep color rising to her face once again, “and Fatty Arbuckle here has already laid his claim.” She laughed, even as the deep flush rose from her chest to her neck and up into her cheeks. “Go,” she said, swallowing air.
We traipsed out, down the stairs, arm in arm because we were the best of best friends and there was the happiness of continuing together the sudden, elaborate affection we had showered on Mrs. Hanson. Into the cool street and around the corner, and there already the black car and the crowd of girls, some with small brothers in tow. And then, as if she had been waiting for our breathless arrival, the stirring of white in the vestibule behind the glass, the door pulled open by Dora Ryan’s stout mother in hat and gloves and a new blue suit, with a trembling orchid on her shoulder. And then Dora herself in her wedding dress and her white shoes, her old father beside her—for Dora was not a young bride, perhaps thirty or so, a third-grade teacher at a distant public school, square shouldered and broad-faced, but lovely anyway, today, in her wedding dress, satin and lace and white stockings and white shoes, with only a small veil to catch what breeze there was. Her brother followed and a sister in a pink gown. The family paused at the top of the steps while a photographer crouched before them, then all swept down to the sidewalk and into the waiting car, each of us gazing silently until Gerty called out, “Good luck, Dora!” and all the other children echoed her call. Dora Ryan waved like a queen from behind our own reflections in the car window.