“Here you are,” the old one said, holding out her immaculate hands, welcoming her. “We’re so happy you’ve thought to join us.”
Sally put her suitcase down. She might have seen the Bronx girl walking quickly past from the corner of her eye. “The truth is,” she said, “I’ve thought better of it.”
Stabat Mater
THERE WERE NO NURSING SISTERS on the street when she walked up from the subway. No Patrick Tierney, either, to call out, “What did I tell you?” when he saw her lugging herself home. That was lucky. She had slept only briefly on the train coming back—buttoned into a lower bunk, but no less terrified going east than she had been going west. The torment on the trip out had been those awful people. The torment of the trip home was the utter loneliness of that dark, narrow berth.
The movement of the train was with her still, in her back and under her feet, as she walked down her own block with her suitcase and then up the familiar steps. There was no one in the entry. No Mrs. Gertler perched in her window on the parlor floor. That was lucky, too. She climbed the stairs. It was early afternoon, but her lack of sleep, her unplanned return, made the hour of the day seem uncertain and strange. Just forty-eight hours ago, she had said her goodbyes to this place, folded into her view of herself the romantic notion that many years would pass before she saw it again. It would not take much imagination, tired as she was, to believe that time had, indeed, intervened and she was returning like some Odysseus, much older and much changed.
Life goes by in the blink of an eye. It would not take any imagination to convince herself that it already had.
Her mother’s voice reached her through the open transom above the apartment door. Her mother’s laughter. Distinct and familiar and yet, as well, indistinguishable from the man’s voice that ran just beneath it. A man’s voice low but rising, rising and falling in a kind of enumerating rhythm, the rhythm of a tale being told, a joke or a story. Inside the apartment, a man was telling her mother a story and her mother was laughing, laughing here and there. There was always something enviable about her mother’s laugh. Ever since she was a child, Sally flew to it. Put up her arms, put her hands to her mother’s broad cheeks to say, What? What?
She thought of Sister Jeanne, raising her face to the sound of it, as if to a warm sun.
Sally eased open the door. Placed her suitcase beside the couch. From the living room she could see that the man had drawn a dining chair into the kitchen doorway. He was sitting in it crookedly, his back to her. He was in shirtsleeves and had his hands in his pant pockets. Her mother was in the kitchen just beyond him, at the stove, but in easy reach. She was frying something in a pan—the spit and sizzle of ham. She was laughing. He was talking. Never in Sally’s experience had a man in shirtsleeves sat in the kitchen doorway in this way, talking to her mother in this way. Not as a visitor would, but as one who was utterly at home in, utterly familiar with, these few rooms. She moved closer, through the living room, to the long sideboard.
From where she paused she could see him better. His hair was black and touched with gray, thick over his neck but thin at the top. His shoulders in his striped shirt were wide. He was collarless. In the glass of the kitchen’s single window she could see a vague reflection of his face: broad forehead, pale, and dark eyes made shadowy by the reflection. “‘Are you telling me?’” he was saying, and Sally recognized the brogue. “‘Are you telling me,’ I asked him, ‘that after all this time…’”
“After all that time,” her mother said without turning, laughing with him, her hips moving, the hem of her long skirt moving, moving with her laughter, and her voice—what was it about her voice that was so new?—bright, easy, warm. Both of their voices so familiar in the exchange. When had she ever heard such a thing in these rooms? When had she ever seen such a thing?
Telling us later, she said, “I had to rub my eyes.”
And then she saw, with an intake of breath, a cry of surprise, that the man’s thin white feet were bare on the linoleum floor.
“Glory be to God,” her mother said, and the man, turning, sat up in his chair. Not Jim at all, not her father returned to them, to her, returned to life in the interval of her departure, but Mr. Costello, the milkman, struggling to stand now, politely, long bare feet and all.
In the bedroom, the sheets and the coverlet were folded down. There was the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, the smell of flesh, some paler, warmer version of the human air of the train. The man’s worn jacket was draped over a chair. His empty shoes placed side by side at the foot of the bed. Her mother followed her there and closed the door behind her.
“You’re back,” she said. Her hair was loose. Her cheeks flushed red. She had grown younger in Sally’s short time away. “What’s happened? You frightened the life out of me.” She paused, and together, mother and daughter took in the tumbled room, the counterpane, the white coat, the man’s two empty shoes at the foot of the bed.
“You’re back,” her mother said again, but this time as if she understood it plainly.
Sally took in the room, what had been her room, her own bed.
She turned to her mother. She felt the sensation of a plunge, with not even a stranger’s shoulder beside her.
“And where will you go?” her mother asked her.
* * *
WHEN THE TWO WOMEN RETURNED to the living room, Mr. Costello—in his bare feet—was standing undecided by the front door with his head bowed, like a man waiting for an elevator. Shyly, he looked up at her mother, and then, as they passed him, he slipped into the bedroom.
Her mother told her to sit at the table. Sally noticed that the dining room chair had been neatly returned to its place. Moments later, her mother brought two plates with the ham and the eggs. She sat down with her daughter. Mr. Costello appeared in his shoes and his white coat and his hair combed down and his cap in his hands. He said, “I’ll be going, then,” politely, and her mother only looked up briefly—and the affection in her eyes was both brand-new and immediately familiar, a reminder of something Sally had always known: the strength of her mother’s capacity to love, the assurance of it.
“Goodbye, dear,” her mother said.
They ate in silence. All was tasteless in her mouth. She felt again the movement of the train beneath her. If she closed her eyes, she knew, she could make herself believe she was still on board, in the suffocating darkness, looking out to this dancing light—this room, this day, her mother’s sure hands, her living presence, her happiness—looking out at it all with what might have been her father’s own eyes: envious, lonesome, buried, bereft.
The Substitute
MRS. TIERNEY SAID, “Take Patrick, then. He’s got his name.”
Mr. Tierney said, “I will.”
It was the end of the argument. They were both red-faced. Both licked the spittle of shouted words from their lips, satisfied. His parents’ arguments, our father said, erupted suddenly, like a street fight, and then, just as rapidly, concluded. Peace descended. Something like happiness.
Their six children came to understand that a certain satisfaction might be found in setting a beloved’s blood boiling.
A telegram had arrived from Poughkeepsie: Mr. Tierney’s father was dead. Mr. Tierney said he must go to the funeral, and Mrs. Tierney asked if he was going to do her the indignity of expecting her to accompany him. He said no, but he would take the children. She said she would not have them missing school for a man they’d never met. He said he would take only the boys, then. She said Michael’s job was already hanging by a thread.
“I won’t stay long,” Mr. Tierney said.
Mrs. Tierney said, “You’re a fool to go at all.”
“I’m his only child,” Mr. Tierney said.
“Didn’t he know that himself?” Mrs. Tierney replied.
“I won’t be plagued by his ghost,” Mr. Tierney shouted.
“He had no use for you when he was alive,” Mrs. Tierney said coolly. “Why would he be coming to you dead?”
“There’s ice water in your veins,” he said.
“There’s sawdust in your head.”
“He’s dead.”
“He let your mother die without you.”
“I didn’t know.”
“The bastard didn’t tell you.”
“He was bitter.”
“He was hateful. He hated me.”
“Us.”
“Us, then.”
“Have a heart. There was a monkey on his back. That cripple in the room upstairs.”
“Where’s my violin?”
“Have some pity.”
“Have some sense.”
“I’ll go alone, then.”
There was a pause. He had spoken the one word she could not abide: alone. All through his growing up, our father said, he couldn’t walk to the corner for a newspaper without his mother urging him to take someone along.
“Take Patrick, then,” she said. “He’s got his name.”
“I will,” he said.
It was the laughter in her voice when next she spoke that signaled to their children that the fight was over. That it had brewed some pleasure for them both. “If the bastard’s going to haunt anyone,” she said, “it will be Patrick.”
Mr. Tierney said, “A ghost could do worse.”
And so our father found himself on the train to Poughkeepsie for the funeral of his grandfather, and namesake, a man he’d never met.
Although Michael Tierney was wearing what he called his “civilian clothes”—starched collar, vest, fine dark wool suit with a thin, pale violet stripe, gleaming shoes, brushed bowler—he retained nevertheless his erect and elegant doorman’s bearing throughout the ride. There was a gold watch and a fob, subtly displayed across his trim middle. A smooth cheek newly shaven and redolent of bay rum. A fine chestnut mustache, gleaming like polished wood, trimmed and combed.
The suit Patrick wore was also fine. It had been purchased from a Jewish tailor on the Lower East Side—one of his father’s “cronies”—for his older brother’s high school graduation just the year before, but because Tom had found work at the Navy Yard, and not in an office, it had been stored ever since in a linen suit bag, weighted with mothballs and cedar blocks.
Given the short notice—the telegram had come from his grandfather’s maiden sister, Rose, just two days ago—his mother had only a single sunny afternoon to air it at the window, and so it retained a whiff of what his father called “its hibernation.” Comically, Mr. Tierney sprinkled his son with cologne before they left the apartment, making the sign of the cross and murmuring in Latin. And so they had gone off to the train in good humor.
His mother had refused to come. Perfectly understandable, Mr. Tierney said, given how the man had stood against their marriage. Because she was an immigrant. Because she was a servant girl in the home of an Upper West Side family who summered in Poughkeepsie—a wealthy family that his own father had admired and envied and aspired to imitate. It had been an elevation for his father, a schoolteacher, the child of immigrants himself, to be invited to the summer home of such people. A confirmation of the schoolteacher’s growing status as town sage, as cosmopolitan man-of-the-world, to be invited to converse with a city man of such wealth, in his own summer place, about business and politics, philosophy and learning.
And an irreconcilable insult that the schoolteacher, so honored, should bring along a son—“Yours truly,” Mr. Tierney told Patrick on the train to Poughkeepsie, “and not much older than you are now”—who, rather than attending to the after-dinner conversation, rather than seizing the opportunity to make himself remarkable to this businessman from Manhattan, a man who might do him some good, put his eyes on a buck-toothed servant girl and refused to draw them away.
“Of course your mother’s not buck-toothed,” his father said on the train, “she’s a beauty beyond compare—but that was my father’s anger speaking, his disappointment and his rage. He didn’t want me coming down in the world, he wanted me going up, up, and up.” On the train, Michael Tierney thrust his right hand into the air as if he were elevating a great weight. Then he dropped it, casually. Shrugged.
It was a fine spring day, and as soon as the train left the city, the smell of new grass and rich earth, sweet country air, began to fill the cars. At each station stop, the sun was morning-bright and full of lovely, floating things, white seed pods and green insects, butterflies and bumblebees. There were urns of vivid flowers at each train station, and the men and women who disembarked seemed all to be greeted by handsome children and happy dogs. His father had given him the window seat when they boarded and then sat with regal bearing on the aisle, tipping his hat to every new passenger. “Lovely day,” he said. “Madam.” “Sir.” “Good morning.” “Fine weather.” The doorman’s trade.
A woman who had already been greeted rose into the aisle to wait for the station ahead. Michael Tierney touched his hat to her again, and she beamed at the two of them. She was not a young woman, but she wore a pale spring suit and a summer fur and there was a gold bracelet over the wrist of the gloved hand that gripped the back of the seat in front of them. “Is this your son?” she asked, and his father said, laughing, “I stand accused.”
“He’s very handsome,” she said, and his father looked at him and feigned a start. “Is he?”
The train was coming into the station. “You are a very handsome pair,” the woman said, her eyes all on his father. Once more his father raised his hat as she left them, smiling, for the door. Father and son exchanged a look of chagrin, and then his father, dear man, put out his hand and patted the boy’s knee. There wasn’t a chance, they both knew, that an estrangement of any sort would ever drive them apart.
The station at Poughkeepsie bustled somewhat more than the others, but it was a country station nonetheless. His father knew the way. It was a small brick church, already filling up with what appeared to be the town’s oldest citizens. Gray-haired men and stooped women in floor-sweeping skirts. The mothball scent of hibernation all about their clothes. The pallbearers—the coffin was a gleaming mahogany—seemed the youngest of the attendees, but even they were thick about the middle. Patrick heard their straining breaths as they carried the coffin down the aisle. They were followed by only two mourners. One was a tiny woman smiling like a bride behind her black veil, and beside her, walking slowly, with practiced patience, a one-legged man who leaned on a crutch, the sleeve of his missing arm pinned neatly against his shoulder. His hair was the pale orange of an ancient redhead, with a streak of pure white on the right side, above a gnarled patch of silver scar tissue, the twisted remains of an ear.
“Aunt Rose,” his father whispered from behind him. “My father’s sister. And Red Whelan. My father’s substitute in the war.”
After the funeral mass, a flushed and heavy man, a friend of his father’s youth, recognized him in the milling crowd. He offered them a ride to the cemetery in an open car that was an adventure for Patrick since there was no need to own a car in Brooklyn. Patrick, in the back seat, stretched himself along the leather upholstery. The day was brighter still, growing warm, the green landscape, lawns and fields and budding trees, was luxuriant, wide open, a painted stage set to his city eyes: there was a simple red barn, comical black-and-white cows, a cartoon silo. Over the whir of the engine and the jostle of the springs, he heard his father say, “And I see old Red is still with us.” The friend wore a straw boater, much like Patrick’s own. “A tough bird,” the man cried. “But no tougher than Rose. Still his caretaker.”
His father turned to shout into the backseat. “Red Whelan,” he began, but the car swerved a bit, avoiding a hole in the road, and an impatience passed over his father’s face, as brief as passing sunlight. He began again, “Red Whelan is the man who served in the Union Army so my father didn’t have to. Saved my old man’s skin. Made it possible for me to be born.”
The friend behind the wheel shouted a laugh at this, and then nodded, as if the connection had taken him by s
urprise. “Isn’t that the truth?” he said. And added, more solemnly, “No truer words,” as if to amend his surprise.
Michael Tierney threw an arm over the backrest, so he could get a better look at his son, lounging as he was in the wide backseat of the jaunty car. He aimed a finger at the boy’s chest, added, “Which means Red Whelan made it possible for you to be born, too.”
Patrick sat up straight, as if in response to a reprimand. But the landscape was not a serious landscape, it was full of broad greens and bright blues and clichéd farmsteads. The car puttered and squeaked like something in a circus. The scenery, this talk of the past, the day itself, was straight from the funny papers. He took none of it seriously.
The stout friend was shouting back to him, eyes on the rearview mirror. “Think of that, my boy. You might never have been. You!” he called out. “The first-born son.” Patrick resisted the impulse to correct him: Tom was the first-born. “The finest fruit of Red’s sacrifice,” he went on, enjoying himself. “You. A barefoot boy with cheeks of tan. Here only by the grace of old Red Whelan.”
That shadow of impatience passed over his father’s features once again. He was, perhaps, remembering how little he liked this old friend. “Nothing is certain,” he said, sober and annoyed. “My father might well have survived the war unscathed if he’d gone. If Red Whelan hadn’t replaced him, he might have survived nonetheless. No one knows.” He turned to face the windshield again, and then, after a few moments of consideration, turned to his son once more. “Although I suppose you should thank the man,” his father said. “If you get the chance.”
At the gravesite, Red Whelan was already seated, so old and thin he looked sunk into his clothes. His uniform. In the sunlight, Patrick now noticed the faded stripe on his one outstretched leg. Sunlight caught as well the golden buttons on his jacket and a medal on his chest. With his broad face and his thick hair, his skull at the top of his narrow shoulders seemed as big and as buoyant as an outsized balloon. Seemed, in fact, to lift him out of the chair when the service was ended and the casket—no flag because it was Red Whelan who had served—was lowered into the freshly dug earth. But in fact it was the little woman, his father’s Aunt Rose, who got him standing, got him steady on his crutch, even in the soft uneven grass. Even though, despite how stooped he was, she came only to his shoulder. His caretaker.
The Ninth Hour Page 15