by Colm Toibin
She tried to tell him about the Wexford hurling team and how they were beaten by Tipperary and how her brothers and her father used to sit glued to the old radiogram in the front room on summer Sundays even if Wexford were not playing. When he began to imitate the commentators, describing imaginary games of his own, she told him that Jack her brother had done the same.
“Hold on,” he said. “You play baseball in Ireland?”
“No, it was hurling.”
He seemed puzzled.
“So it wasn’t baseball?” His face registered disappointment, then a sort of exasperation.
One night in the parish hall when the band, which had been playing swing tunes, began to play a tune that Tony seemed to recognize, he went crazy, as did many around him. “It’s the Jackie Robinson song,” he shouted. He began to swing an imaginary baseball bat. “They’re playing ‘Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?’”
As soon as Eilis returned to her classes at Brooklyn College the baseball frenzy became worse. What surprised her was that she had noticed nothing of it the previous year although it must have been going on around her with the same intensity. Now she had returned to her routine of seeing Tony on Thursday nights after class, on Friday nights in the parish hall and on Saturday for a movie, and he talked of nothing except how this would be the perfect year for him if they could be together, Eilis and himself, and if Laurence and Maurice and Frankie could be with them too and if the Dodgers could win the World Series. To her great relief, he made no further mention of having kids who would be Dodgers supporters.
She walked with the four brothers through the crowds to Ebbets Field. They had left themselves plenty of time to stop and talk to anyone at all who had news of the players, or opinions about how the game would go, or to buy hot dogs and sodas, to linger outside, part of the crush. Slowly, the differences between the brothers became more apparent to her. While Maurice smiled and seemed easygoing, he did not speak to strangers and held himself back when the others did. Tony and Frank stayed close to each other all the time, Frank eager to know what Tony’s latest opinion was. Laurence seemed to know most about the game and could easily contradict some of Tony’s assertions. She laughed at Frank as he looked from Tony to Laurence when they argued about the merits of Ebbets Field itself, Laurence insisting it was too small and old-fashioned and would have to be moved, Tony answering that it would never be moved. Frank’s eyes darted from one brother to the other; he appeared genuinely perplexed. Maurice never got involved in the arguments but managed to move them forward in the direction of the field, warning them that they were going too slowly.
When they found their seats, they put Eilis in the middle with Tony and Maurice on either side of her, Laurence on Tony’s left and Frank to the right of Maurice.
“Mom told us we weren’t to leave you at the edge,” Frank said to her.
Both Tony and her fellow lodgers had explained the rules of the game to Eilis and made it seem like rounders, which she had played at home with her brothers and their friends; still she did not know what to expect because rounders, she thought, was fine in its way but it had never provoked the same excitement as hurling or football. At Mrs. Kehoe’s the night before Miss McAdam had insisted that it was the best game in the world but all of the others thought that it was too slow, with too many breaks. Diana and Patty agreed that the best part was going off to get hot dogs and sodas and beers and finding that nothing important had happened while you were away, despite all the shouting and cheering.
“It was stolen from us the last time, that’s all I have to say,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “It was a very bitter moment.”
Now, with half an hour to go before the game, everyone around them was behaving as though it was just about to begin. Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all. Normally, he was attentive, smiling at her, asking her questions, listening to her, telling her stories. Now, in the heat of this excitement, he could no longer manage the role of caring, thoughtful boyfriend. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard. He could not stay quiet, standing up and sitting back down and craning his neck to see what was going on behind. All the while Maurice, who had bought a programme, perused it and regularly offered Eilis and his three brothers nuggets of information that he had gleaned. He seemed worried.
“If we lose this game Tony will go crazy,” he said to her. “And if we win he’ll go even more crazy and Frankie with him.”
“So which would be better,” she asked, “win or lose?”
“Win,” he said.
Tony and Frank went to get more hot dogs and beers and sodas.
“Keep our seats,” Tony said, and grinned.
“Yeah, keep our seats,” Frank repeated.
When the players finally appeared, all four brothers jumped up and vied with one another to identify them, but quite soon, when something happened that seemed to displease Tony, he sat back in his seat, despondent. For a moment he held her hand.
“They’re all against us,” he said.
But when the game started Tony launched into a running commentary that rose to a climax every time there was any action. Sometimes, when Tony was quiet, Frank took over and drew their attention to something, only to be told to stop by Maurice, who watched each second with slow and deliberate intensity, hardly speaking at all. He was, nonetheless, she felt, even more involved and excited than Tony, despite all the shouting, cheering, cajoling and whooping that Tony did.
She simply could not follow the game, could make no sense of how you would score, or what constituted a good hit or a bad one. Nor could she work out which player was which. And it was as slow as Patty and Diana had said it would be. She knew, however, that she should not go to the bathroom because it was possible that the very moment she announced her departure would be the moment no one wanted her to miss.
As she sat quietly watching the game, trying to understand its intricate rituals, it struck Eilis that Tony, despite his constant movements and his screaming at Frank to pay attention to some score or other, and his cheering followed by statements of pure despair, did not manage to irritate her even once. She thought it was strange, and out of the side of her eye and sometimes directly she started to watch him, noticing how funny he was, how alive, how graceful, how alert to things. She began to appreciate also how much he was enjoying himself; he was doing so even more than his brothers, more openly, with greater humour and infectious ease. She did not mind, indeed she almost enjoyed the fact that he was paying her no attention, leaving it to Maurice to explain when he could what was happening.
Tony was so wrapped up in the game that it gave her a chance to let her thoughts linger on him, float towards him, noting how different from her he was in every way. The idea that he would never see her as she felt that she saw him now came to her as an infinite relief, as a satisfactory solution to things. His excitement and the excitement of the crowd began to lift her spirits until she even pretended that she could follow what was happening. She cheered for the Dodgers as much as anyone around her; and then she followed Tony’s eyes, looking at what he was pointing to, and sat back silently with him when the team seemed to be losing.
Finally, after nearly two hours everyone stood up. She and Tony and Frank arranged to meet at the queue for the hot-dog stand closest to their seats after she had been to the bathroom. Since she was thirsty now and felt, when she had found them at the head of the line, that she wanted to be as much a part of everything as she could, she ordered a beer too, her first ever, and tried to run the mustard and ketchup along the hot dog with the same flourish as Tony and Frank.
By the time they got back to their seats, the game had resumed. She asked Maurice if it was really only half over and he explained that in baseball there is no half time, the break comes after the seventh inning near to the end and it’s more of a pause—a stretch they call it. It struck her that he was the only o
ne of the four brothers who had any sense of the depth of her ignorance of the game. She sat back and smiled to herself at the thought of this, its strangeness, how little it appeared to matter to her even in those moments when she found what was happening on the field most totally bewildering. All she knew was that luck and success were once more, for one reason or another, slowly evading the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Because she spent Thanksgiving with Tony’s family, his mother thought that Eilis could come for Christmas too and seemed almost offended, asking if their food was not to her taste, when she refused. She explained that she could not let Father Flood down and was going to work in the parish hall for a second year. Tony and his mother told her several times that someone else could take her turn and do her work, but she was adamant. She felt slightly guilty at their assumption that she was performing an act of selfless charity when she would also, she knew, be happier in the parish hall working than spending a long day with a supper the night before in the small apartment with Tony and his family. She loved them, each of them, and found the differences between the four brothers intriguing, but sometimes she found the pleasure of being alone after a lunch or a supper with them greater than the pleasure of the meal itself.
In the days after Christmas she saw Tony every evening. On one of these evenings he outlined to her the plans they had, how he, Maurice and Laurence had bought at a bargain price a plot of land on Long Island that they were going to develop. It would take time, he said, maybe a year or two because it was a good distance from services and it looked like nothing except bare land. But soon, they knew, the services would reach there. What was empty now, he said, would within a few years have paved roads and water and electricity. On their plot there was enough space for five houses, each with its own garden. Maurice was going to evening classes in cost engineering and Tony and Laurence would be able to do the plumbing and the carpentry.
The first house, he explained, would be for the family; his mother longed for a garden and a proper house of her own. And then, he said, they would build three houses and sell them. But Maurice and Laurence had asked him if he wanted the fifth house and he had said that he did and he was asking her now if she would like to live in Long Island. It was near the ocean, he said, and not far from where the train stopped. But he did not want to take her there yet because it was winter and it was bare and bleak with nothing but waste ground and scrubland. The house would be theirs, he said, they could plan it themselves.
She watched him carefully because she knew that this was his way not only of asking her to marry him but of suggesting that marriage had been already tacitly agreed between them. It was the details of how they would live, the life he could offer her, that he was presenting now. Eventually, he said, he and his two brothers would set up a company and they would build houses. Now they were saving money and making plans, but with their skills and the first plot in their possession it would not be long and it would mean that they could soon, all of them, have a much better life. She said nothing in reply. She was almost in tears at what he was proposing and how practical he was as he spoke and how serious and sincere. She did not want to say she would think about it because she knew how that might sound. Instead, she nodded and smiled and reached out and held his two hands and pulled him towards her.
She wrote once more to Rose, using her sister’s office address, and told her how far things had gone; she attempted to describe Tony, but it was difficult without making him sound too boyish or silly or giddy. She mentioned that he never used bad language or curse words because she thought it was important for Rose to know that he was not like anyone at home, that this was a different world and in this world Tony shone despite the fact that his family lived in two rooms or that he worked with his hands. She tore the letter up a few times; she had made it sound as though she were pleading for him, instead of merely trying to explain that he was special and that she was not staying with him simply because he was the first man she had met.
In her letters to her mother, however, Eilis had never once mentioned him; even though she had described Coney Island and the baseball game, she had said only that she had gone with friends. She wished now that she had made one or two casual references to him six months ago so that it might not come as such a surprise now, but when she made an attempt to put him into her letters to her mother she found that it was not possible without writing in a full paragraph about him and where she had met him and what he was like. She found that she postponed doing this every time she tried.
When Rose replied, the letter was brief. It was clear to her that Rose had heard once more from Father Flood. Rose said that Tony seemed very nice, and, since they were both young, they would not have to make any decisions, and that the best news was that Eilis would, by the summer, be a qualified bookkeeper and could start to look for experience. Rose imagined, she wrote, that Eilis must be really looking forward to getting off the shop floor and having a job in an office, which would not only pay more money but be easier on the legs.
At Bartocci’s, everyone had become more relaxed about the coloured customers and Eilis was moved to different counters a number of times. Since Miss Fortini had told the Bartoccis about her passing her exams and being in her final year, Miss Bartocci had said that if any vacancy arose as a junior bookkeeper even before she was fully qualified then they would consider her.
The second-year course was simpler because Eilis was not as afraid of what might appear on the exam paper. And because she had read the law books and taken notes on them, she was able to follow most of what Mr. Rosenblum was talking about. But she was still careful to miss no lectures and not to see Tony except for each Thursday, when he walked her home, each Friday, when they went together to the dance at the parish hall, and each Saturday, when he took her to a diner and a movie. Even when the winter began to descend on Brooklyn, she liked her room and her routine, and as the spring came she began to study on the nights when she came home from her lectures and on Sundays as well so she could be sure to get through her exams.
She found work on the shop floor boring and tiring, and often, especially in the early days of the week when they were not busy, the time went slowly. But Miss Fortini was always watching and noticed if anyone took a break they were not due or were late or seemed not ready to serve the next customer. Eilis was careful how she stood, and she watched out in case a customer needed her. She learned that time passed more slowly if she heeded the clock or if she thought about it at all, so she learned to be patient, and then, once she finished work and walked out of the store each day, she managed to put it out of her mind completely and enjoy the freedom.
One afternoon when she saw Father Flood coming into the store she thought nothing of it. Although she had not seen him there since the day when he was called by the Bartoccis, she knew that he was a friend of Mr. Bartocci and might have business with him. She noticed him speaking to Miss Fortini first and saw him glancing over at her and making as though he was going to come over towards her, but instead after some discussion with Miss Fortini they both went in the direction of the office. She served a customer and then, seeing that someone had unfolded a number of blouses, she went over and put them neatly back in their place. When she turned, Miss Fortini was coming towards her and there was something in the expression on her face that made Eilis want to retreat from her, move away quickly pretending that she had not seen her.
“I wonder if you could come to the office for a moment,” Miss Fortini said.
Eilis asked herself if she had done something, if someone had accused her of something.
“What is it about?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Miss Fortini said. “It’s just best if you follow me.”
In the way Miss Fortini turned and walked briskly ahead Eilis felt even more that she had done something wrong that had only now been discovered. When they moved from the shop floor and she was following Miss Fortini down a corridor, she stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said
, “but you will have to tell me what this is about.”
“I can’t tell you,” Miss Fortini said.
“Can you give me some idea?”
“It’s something in your family.”
“Something or someone?”
“Someone.”
Immediately, Eilis thought that her mother might have had a heart attack or fallen down the stairs or that one of her brothers had had an accident in Birmingham.
“Which of them?” she asked.
Miss Fortini did not reply but walked on ahead of her again until she came to a door at the end of a corridor, which she opened. She stood back and let Eilis enter. It was a small room and Father Flood was alone sitting on a chair. He stood up hesitantly and indicated to Miss Fortini that she should leave them.
“Eilis,” he said. “Eilis.”
“Yes. What is it?”
“It’s Rose.”
“What happened to her?”
“Your mother found her dead this morning.”
Eilis said nothing.
“She must have died in her sleep,” Father Flood said.
“Died in her sleep?” Eilis asked, going over in her mind when she had last heard from Rose or from her mother and if there was any hint of anything wrong.
“Yes,” he said. “It was sudden. She was out playing golf yesterday and in the best of form. She died in her sleep, Eilis.”
“And my mother found her?”
“Yes.”
“Do the others know?”
“Yes, and they’re heading home on the mail-boat. She’s being waked tonight.”