He spread his hands. “I, ah, don’t write these pamphlets. Perhaps you have a point.”
“I see. Now about this written statement. After I write it and turn it in, who reads it?”
“We do.”
“Priests?”
“Of course. Priests from this office.”
“All men?”
“They would have to be.”
“That means none of them ever were married.”
“That’s right.”
The priest was answering these questions with the confidence instilled in him by two thousand years of his church. Dolores, who had arrived in the building with the willingness to obey, found herself suddenly tense. Maybe it was the absence of cigarettes. Or maybe the two women talking in the diner had something to do with it.
“How would they know what I’m talking about?” Dolores asked.
“I think you’re underrating the ability and training of people,” the priest said.
“But it’s still all men?”
“Yes. Certainly you don’t think that a priest trained in this religion can’t be compassionate and objective?”
“But you’re all men. Men who never got a divorce or an annulment. A man never condemns another man. Who’s going to condemn a man in here when it’s all men making the decisions?”
“We look to condemn nobody.”
“It’s still men judging something between a man and a woman.”
“We have nuns advising us.”
“Maybe one of the nuns should be a priest.”
The priest smiled and didn’t answer.
“The booklet says that you give an annulment on psychological grounds,” Dolores said.
The priest said, “We do go into the psychological factors present in both parties at the time of the marriage. We want to see if they were so dazzled that they couldn’t possibly have been aware of what they were doing.”
“In other words, if I get an annulment it means that it’s the same as saying that the marriage never took place.”
“Something approximating that.”
“I’m not going to say it never happened. I’m not sorry that I got married. I don’t want to deny it now.”
The priest spread his hands.
“We can recommend counselors,” he said.
“Some more men?” she said.
She decided it was time to leave.
“Thank you,” she said. “If it’s all the same with you, I think I’ll come back here when you have a woman at the desk. Or maybe a married man. I think that would be nice. It also would make about half the population trust you a little more. Thank you very much.”
She left with a smile and took the elevator downstairs and walked out of the school building and down the streets of attached houses to the el. The idea of a long ride on a train, and then a bus, over to Glendale, made her feel tired. She looked at a cab parked in front of the diner and started walking toward it. She stopped and looked into her purse. She had eleven dollars. She remembered her husband saying grandly that he was going to buy her a car. The trouble with him, she thought, was that he threw some of his money on the kitchen table and he spread the rest on the bar and hoped somewhere, between kitchen Formica and saloon wood, a few of the bills would take hold and grow like a bush. In her mind now she could see Owney’s money on the bar, spread out like playing cards, wet, a hand with honest dirt on it moving the money around. Now a barmaid’s red fingernails picked at the money and made it disappear. As Dolores walked up the el steps, she could hear saloon voices, mostly mumbles, once in a while a loud laugh at something stupid. And then somebody proclaiming, “I work for my money.” Works for it and then takes it out of his family’s mouth, she thought.
The afternoon light fell on her engagement ring. She began to think of the night Owney had given it to her. They were at Pep McGuire’s on Queens Boulevard at a table in the back that had a candle on it and she got up and ran to the ladies’ room and grabbed her hand to look at the ring. Back at the table, she and Owney sat and held hands and looked at the ring in the candlelight. He moved his glass out of the way. He knew how to make room for something pleasant, she thought. After that, he seemed to keep the glass where it was and block anything decent from reaching him.
She sat on the train and looked at the ring on the ride to Queens Plaza. She got off the train, went downstairs to the subway, and took the E train to 169th Street in Jamaica.
The man on line in front of her at the Provident Loan Office unzipped a cloth bag and took out a shotgun. “How much do I get?” he asked.
The man behind the window shook his head. “We don’t take them anymore.”
“All I need is fifty,” the man with the shotgun said.
“We have enough trouble with guns without giving loans on them,” the man behind the window said.
Dolores stepped up and shoved the ring under the glass partition.
“How much you want on this?” the man said.
“Whatever I can get,” she said.
He walked away from the window with the ring. She stood at the counter and stared at the floor. She hoped she would not have to answer many personal questions.
The man came back and said, “I can give you six hundred.”
She nodded.
“For how long?” he asked.
“For my life this far,” she said.
He smiled and began making out the ticket. Behind her on the line now were two women. I yelled at the priest, she thought, then we all come here and wait for a man to give us money, even on a loan.
“All right,” the man behind the window said. He handed her a ticket, which she signed, and then the six hundred. That’s my present to myself, Dolores thought. A nice cheap car.
“Merry Christmas,” she told the man. She put the money into her purse and went outside to look for a cab.
When he reached her the first time, at four in the afternoon, he thought that a visit to her mother merely had wound up as an overnight stay.
“I tried calling you this morning, but the phone was off the hook. I guess the baby knocked it off.”
“I took the phone off,” Dolores said.
“Oh, your mother wanted to sleep.”
“No, I did.”
“All right. What are you doing now?”
“I’m at my mother’s.”
“Why are you still there?”
“That’s interesting that you should ask. You never wondered where I was before this.”
“You were always home.”
“How would you know? You never were there.”
“Well, I’m coming home right now.”
“Good for you. Bye.”
Her mother, standing at the kitchen sink, was alarmed by the laconic conversation, which raised in her the terrifying notion that somewhere there actually might be the prospect of permanence.
“You two can’t talk?”
“I just can’t stand it anymore.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what if nobody wanted to carry their Cross?” She dried the last knife and with nothing else left, but her hands still in motion, she seemed tempted to dry the dust in the air.
The next morning, for the first time in many years, the mother did not get out of bed. “I’m all right,” she said.
“She don’t have to go to the doctor,” Aunt Grace said. “It’s just we never had anything like this in the family before.”
“Where do you think I came from?” Dolores said.
“That’s what I’m worried about,” her mother said.
Then one morning, with a cold rain rattling on the windows, Dolores was changing from her robe to clothes for the day when the baby crawled across the hallway and, in Aunt Grace’s kitchen, began tugging on the garbage can. Dolores walked out of her room. She found her mother and aunt sitting with both hands on the coffee cups.
“She’ll spill everything!”
Dolores trotted across the hall, picked up the baby, and brought her back to the
playpen, which was in the dining room. The tops of the tables were bare and even pictures on the wall several feet higher than the baby’s head had been removed. Upon finding herself being dropped into confinement, the baby sent a wail throughout the apartment. She did not have to see the two women in the kitchen across the hall to know that their backs stiffened to the sound of crying. Dolores warmed a bottle, handed it down to the baby, and then put on her raincoat.
Seeing Dolores dressed this way, the mother gasped. “You leave me with the baby crying?”
“I’m going to the store.”
“What for?”
“The butcher’s.”
“For what?”
“I won’t tell you what I’m going to get. I’ll surprise you.”
The mother answered with a grunt. When Dolores returned with a half dozen loin lamb chops, her mother, unwrapping them, suddenly tried to send her voice through the ceiling. “You give a beggar a horse and they’ll ride straight to Hell.”
“Much too dear,” Aunt Grace said.
“You’re cheaper off with nice shoulder lamb chops like I told you.”
“You never told me anything, Ma.”
“I have to tell you something you should know?”
Her mother now spoke rapidly under her breath, which caused Dolores to say, “Will you stop? I paid for it.”
“Next time you won’t have money and you’ll be spending mine.”
That morning was proof, Dolores told herself, that she had given no thought, even subconsciously, to her returning home; that she simply had been driven out of living with Owney by his assaults on her wounded pride, for even the most fleeting consideration of this move would have caused her to sense the conflict that arises the moment anybody tries to reopen a nest. She walked through the apartment and in each room she could feel the presence of the baby. Give it just a little time, she thought, and her mother would think the baby was alongside wherever she went.
Suddenly, now that she had stepped out of a life she never had considered before and was examining each part in such detail, she found that the day had no voice; that when she went downstairs on the pretext of looking for mail, or for the newspaper, or for a neighbor, she found only silent air on an empty street and her muscle control dissolved in the blankness of the day outside the door. She got out on the stoop and then could move no more. No wonder, she thought, that they’re all half dead around here. The trip to work, and the boredom and nervousness of jobs, kills men, she thought, while the silence everybody longs for descends, on women who claim they revel in days that say nothing to them and have the energy drained from them, and they sit through silent days that destroy them far more than any series of subway trips in trains crowded with living people.
As Dolores sat out on the stoop and looked out at the soundless street, the wind tried to lift the lids of the garbage cans; let them go, it wouldn’t even matter, Dolores thought, for the covers were made of green plastic. She shivered, not in the wind, but in realization of the days she had spent in this same kind of silence while waiting for Owney. A disease she couldn’t see.
Finally, there was a small noise that came through the air. Nancy Lucarella’s mother, head wrapped in a kerchief, tubby body inside a blue down coat, made her way down the street from the avenue, pushing a shopping basket.
“Half a day for me today,” she said. “That’s so I could shop and then come home and do floors.”
“Where’s Nancy?”
“Inside working, I think.”
“Tell her I’ll come over tomorrow.”
The woman nodded and then went inside and the street turned silent again, with the row houses watching with polished eyes. Dolores was immobile in the silence. She turned and went back upstairs, where her mother and Aunt Grace and another woman from the house were at the kitchen table and as Dolores walked past she heard her mother reading the Long Island Press aloud to them.
“Oh, boy, look at this, Gracie, you’re so right. Gang got on the subway in Brooklyn, mugged some old lady almost dead.”
“Don’t tell me about my subway trains,” Aunt Grace said. “Where was it?”
“Myrtle-Willoughby stop. The GG train.”
“That’s the one they want to run through here. Can you imagine that?”
“Savages got on after school and the poor woman tried to hold on to her purse. They pulled her arm, dislocated her shoulder. A seventy-five-year-old woman.”
The mother glanced up at Dolores. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“I’m thinking,” Dolores said.
“Think a little faster,” her mother said. Her mother and her aunt half laughed, but Dolores did not. That night, her cousin Virginia sat and watched television with her and Dolores barely heard what Virginia was saying.
In the middle of the following morning, she put her hands over her ears and ran across the empty street and into Nancy Lucarella’s house. Dolores found her in the same black T-shirt, with a cigarette and Tab, and one arm on a stack of paper.
“The galley proofs for my book,” she said. “You saw them when they were only typed pages. Remember?”
“That was so long ago,” Dolores said. “Three years, no, four years easy.”
“It takes time,” Nancy said. “They don’t give in so easy to our kind.”
“When does the book come out?”
“Soon. You see the proofs.”
“That’s great. I asked so many times.”
“It took so much time.”
“It must be hard. I wanted to come over a hundred times. Your mother always said you were tied up.”
“I sit here working every day.”
“Am I disturbing you now?”
“No.”
“Then let me get a Tab.”
Nancy waved to the refrigerator. Dolores took one out and then sat down.
“So let me see what a galley proof looks like.”
Nancy’s arm suddenly tightened. “No. I don’t let anybody see anything until it’s all done.”
“Fine.”
“It’s very hard when they don’t want you to make it.”
“Well, it better not be. Because I’m about to start out. I’m not living home with Owney now, you know.”
“Everybody is against me. People like us, we’re not supposed to get anywhere. Look at you, what do you do, you live in Glendale.”
“I just told you, I’m going to have to start on something.”
“So you have a baby and you live in Glendale. What do your friends do?”
“They’re all over the place. My girlfriend Margo works as a legal secretary. Debbie Corkery works as a nurse. Couple of them got married, moved away. I don’t know. They do what you do.”
“When you come from Glendale,” Nancy said.
The two became silent. Then Dolores said, “I’m thinking of doing something pretty good.”
“You’ll never make it,” Nancy said.
“How can you say that when you don’t even know what I’m going to do?”
“Because they stop everybody from Glendale. They stopped me from getting my mother’s money.”
Dolores laughed. “What money? Her sixty-dollar paycheck?”
“No. From my real mother. Marilyn Monroe was my mother.”
Dolores laughed, and the laugh stopped as she saw Nancy’s eyes, which seemed to reflect a fever.
“Milton Green knows about it. He was the photographer who took all my mother’s pictures. His lawyer told me to get a lawyer and sue the surrogate’s court to get my money from my mother.”
“Your mother is inside doing the rug,” Dolores said.
“She’s not my mother. She’s nobody. My mother is dead and I want my money. Do you know where I can get a lawyer?”
“I thought you told me this Milton Green spoke to you.”
“He didn’t speak to me. I told you his lawyer spoke to me.”
“Oh.”
Hearing a noise in the living room, Nancy turned h
er head and glared. “That’s not my mother inside. She’s nothing.”
“Well,” Dolores said, smiling and getting up, “I think I better go back to my baby.”
Nancy’s fingers played with the top sheet of the stack of paper. “I don’t care about this book. Why don’t they just give me what’s mine from my mother?”
Dolores didn’t answer and as she left, she started toward Mrs. Lucarella, but the mother stood in the living room with her vacuum cleaner and a frightened look and she held a finger to her lips. Dolores nodded and left.
She sat alone and watched the baby, who by now was sleeping, watched the small back rise and fall and the hand clench and unclench, and she began to think of Owney, and immediately she felt her insides deaden, and so she thought about her clothes or the cold outside or the beach in the summer, and then she thought of Owney again. This time she saw him with those bright amused eyes and this disdain on his face for something that was going on that he didn’t like. She saw him walking with that assurance pouring out of his body. Then it all became clouded in her mind and through the vapor she saw only a bar covered with old glasses. She shook her head and sat alone and thought of Nancy Lucarella. Suddenly, the unknown troubled Dolores.
That night he called—his voice full of cheer and command, and in her mind she could see him, alert and assured—and he said, “I’m coming over to get you.” Then he added, “I got a bullshit call from that lawyer.”
“Well,” she said.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“If you don’t come home, I won’t give you a dollar. I work too hard for my money to be giving it to somebody isn’t even here.”
“Oh,” Dolores said, everything in her suddenly rising, “I was under the impression that it was your child, too.”
“I don’t pay anything for anybody not here.”
“I think you better,” Dolores said.
His voice turned into a squall and she hung up in the middle of it.
The next night, at six o’clock, Dolores went downstairs and waited for her cousin Virginia to come home from work.
“Come for a walk with me,” Dolores said.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Couple of places.”
“I don’t want to go for too long. I got to eat dinner. Then I got to iron my dress for tomorrow.”
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