It was the first light my poor eyes ever knew. Recalling it, I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.
I followed my father to the narrow closet and held the newspaper for him while he hung up his overcoat and placed his hat on the shelf. He went to the couch in the living room and I went with him, fitting myself into his side, leaning heavily against his arm—“like a barnacle,” he said—as he read the evening paper.
The slipcover, also my mother’s handiwork, was a paradise of hummingbirds and vines and deep-throated flowers, the colors, if not the images, subdued by the thick brocade. Sinking into my father’s side, slipping under his arm as he patiently lifted the open paper to accommodate me, I entered that paradise via my tracing fingertip and squinted eyes, until he said, “Marie,” patiently, and asked me to sit up a bit.
He kept a long key chain attached to his belt, and perhaps to keep my bony weight from putting his arm to sleep, he pulled the keys at the end of it out of his pocket and placed them in my hands. There were two keys, small but heavy, and the metal disks with his embossed name and number from his time in the army, as well as a small St. Joseph medal tinged with green. I turned them over as he read, traced them with my fingers, tested the weight and the jingle of them. I wondered if Bill Corrigan, who had been gassed in the war, carried something of the same in his pocket.
When my mother called to me to get up and set the table, my father put his hand to the top of my head.
Slipping out of that first darkness, into the dusty, city light of these rooms, I met the blurred faces of the parents I’d been given—given through no merit of my own—faces that even to my defective eyes, ill-formed, you might say, in the hours of that first darkness, were astonished by love.
We gathered for dinner, a piece of oilcloth spread across the table now, on an ordinary night—the last concession to my sloppy childhood, because in another few weeks, after my First Communion, we would abandon the oilcloth cover at meals and once again dine on starched linen, like civilized people, as my father put it. Mashed potatoes and slices of beef tongue and carrots boiled with sugar. Canned peaches with a tablespoon of heavy cream. Then the cloth was folded back again, and once again my brother spread his blotter and his books across the cleared end of the long table.
In the narrow kitchen, standing over the steaming sink, her hands red to the elbow, my mother was unconcerned. “Pegeen Chehab,” she said, “has big feet.” And girls that age, she said, were always tripping over themselves, looking for boys.
She handed me a wet saucer. I was not yet allowed to dry the dinner plates. The kitchen was warm and close, the one window was steamed, and the pleasant scent in the air was of soap and of the spring sunshine that had dried my mother’s apron.
For my mother, who loved romance—especially an American romance, which involved, for her, a miraculous commingling of lives across comically disparate portions of the globe—the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Chehab was a continual source of wonder and delight. She told the story again: The place where Mr. Chehab was born was called Mt. Lebanon, in a country called Syria. A desert, she said. With a desperately hot sun and palm trees and dates and pineapples and sand and—she shrugged a little, her voice suddenly uncertain—a mount, apparently.
She handed me a small drinking glass and said, Be sure you don’t put your hand inside, just the cloth.
His own parents, she said, wrapped him in swaddling clothes and carried him away from that sunny place. They crossed over the Mediterranean Sea. They scaled Spain.
She squinted at the damp tiles above the sink as if a map were drawn there.
They climbed through France, reached Paris, which is called the City of Light, crossed the White Cliffs of Dover—there is a song—got to Liverpool, no doubt, to Dublin, found Cork, as she herself had done when she was seventeen, wearing three skirts and four blouses and carrying only a purse so her stepfather, a terrible man, would not know she was leaving home.
At the harbor, Mr. and Mrs. Chehab found a ship that brought them to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, they put the baby into a cradle, in the cool corner of a basement bakery on Joralemon Street.
And all the while, my mother said—a trill of profound amusement rising into her voice—in County Clare, Mrs. Chehab—who was a McMahon then—was taking her own first breaths. And shivering, no doubt, in the eternal dampness of that bleak country’s bitter air.
My mother looked at me from over her shoulder, her hands still in the sink.
There’s a burned taste to the air at home, she said—not for the first time. A taste of wet ashes and doused fire. It can make you believe, she said, that you live in the permanent aftermath of some nearby sorrow. Somewhere in the vicinity, you’re always thinking, Someone’s house has recently burned to the ground.
In that damp and dirty country, my mother said, Mrs. Chehab grew to be a tall girl, a girl who would have no trouble getting up the steep gangplank that led from the dock—a climb my mother herself had struggled with, she said, because of the rain that fell on the day she sailed, because she was alone, with no man’s arm to hold on to and none offered across the whole trip—not until my father gave her his on the steps at the Grand Army Plaza.
But Mrs. Chehab would have had no trouble keeping those long feet steady against the slick and pitching floor of the ship that carried her here. Where she stopped at the Syrian bakery one day and saw a small, dark-eyed man behind the counter.
I watched my mother move her hands through the water once more, searching for stray silverware, smiling her sly smile at the delightful oddity of it all. Then she pulled the stopper from the sink, and I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears to block out the terrible sound.
When I removed them and opened my eyes, my mother was swabbing the counter. “And after all that,” she said, “and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.”
When the dishes were put away, my father went to the narrow closet for his hat and said, “Let’s take a stroll.”
We went down the stairs together. Shined black tips of his neat shoes and perfect fall of his trouser cuffs over the smooth laces. A lilt in the tap of his step on the uncarpeted stair, tap of our steps. Out through the vestibule and onto the sidewalk again. We were in front of the Chehabs’ building when he dropped my hand and paused to light a cigarette, the smoke rising white from under the bowed brim of his hat. And then he threw his head back with the pleasure of that first exhalation of smoke. Made me look up as well to see the stars. A thin handsome man, forty years old.
It was one of his shanty cousins, the McGeevers, who would later say that a body so thin was nothing more than a walking invitation to misfortune.
He took my hand again. There was the sure familiarity of his grip, warm and firm, the palm broad against my small fingers. We walked to the other corner, away from the subway, although there was still the sound of it somewhere beneath our feet. There was as well the sound of a trolley on another street, the sound of someone calling to a child, someone shouting inside a building. Lights at windows were growing brighter, growing warmer, it seemed, as the air grew cold. There was the scent of metal, whiff of tar, of stone, of dog droppings left beside the wrought-iron cage that surrounded a scrawny tree. The soft gabardine of my father’s suit jacket against the back of my hand. At the corner, we turned and he tossed the glowing cigarette into the street.
“I’ll be only a minute,” he said. He put his two hands on my shoulders, as if to place me more securely on the sidewalk before another stoop, and then turned to push through a narrow iron fence that led down a dim alley. The air was black, but the lights in the buildings were warm and golden. Only a few people went by, their coats drawn around them. O
ne man touched his hand to the brim of his hat as he passed and I dropped my chin shyly. And then rose up on my toes after he’d gone, putting my face to the streetlight as if to a warm sun. I squinted, and the light burst and stretched itself yellow and white into the darkness. I heard the squeal of the iron gate and my father was beside me again, the sharp smell of the drink he’d just had in the air about him. He held out his hand. In the center of his palm there was a white cube of sugar, sparkling in the light. I plucked it up and slipped it into my mouth. I turned it with my tongue. Watching, my father pursed his lips and shifted his jaw, as if he, too, felt the sugar on his teeth. Then he took my hand again.
We passed the Chehabs’ parlor window, where there was a lamp and a chair and the back of Mr. Chehab’s dark head and broad shoulders as he smoked a cigar and read the evening news.
In the vestibule, my father shot back his cuffs and put his warm palms to my face. He studied me seriously, smiling only a little—I was a round-faced, narrow-eyed, homely, comical little thing—until my cheeks were warm enough, he said, to pass muster with my mother. And we climbed the stairs once more.
There was tea, with a slice of plain cake, while my mother, with one of his schoolbooks in her lap, put my brother through his paces: catechism questions, Latin declensions, history’s dates and names. He answered all without hesitation, breaking off pieces of the cake only after he had finished a round. And then, with a jagged line of cake still left on his plate and half his milky tea still in his cup, he pushed back his chair and walked slowly to the far end of the table.
My father, at the opposite end, moved his own cup aside and leaned forward. I could see the reflection of his pale throat and chin in the table’s dark wood, like a face just beginning to appear in a still pool of black water. Or disappear. “What will we have tonight?” he said.
My brother ran his hands over his thick hair and then rested them both on the back of the chair that was before him. He lifted his eyes to the wall just above my father’s head. He was a handsome boy with narrow shoulders and fair hair and large brown eyes. He flushed easily. “‘The Seven Ages of Man,’” he said clearly, gripping the chair. “By William Shakespeare.”
He began. As Gabe recited, I watched my father vaguely shape his mouth around the words, unconsciously moving his lips in much the same way he had done when I turned the sugar cube on my tongue.
My mother kept her head bowed, studying her red hands in her lap while the poem wound on, looking like a woman at prayer, or hunched beside a radio.
I lowered my chin toward the table, raised my cup only briefly from its saucer. What tea was left was growing cold, but that was how I liked it. I took a small sip and then replaced the cup with more noise than was polite, which would have earned me a sharp look from my mother had the sound not coincided with the end of the poem and my parents’ gentle applause.
“Some Shelley,” my father said.
My friend Gerty Hanson was made to say the Rosary with her family every night after dinner, her mother and father and all three of her big brothers kneeling on the floor around the parents’ bed. I had joined them once or twice, a ritual no less tedious than this, although Gerty, at least, was given the chance to lead the prayer every fifth decade, the chance to speak out into an attentive silence—whereas here I was meant only to listen to my brother, who had won the elocution medal at his school for what seemed to me more years than I could number.
Gabe raised his eyes and directed his voice to the simple chandelier above our heads. It was new to my ears, his voice, both deeper and somehow less certain than it had been just days ago. I watched the protruding Adam’s apple bob in his pale throat. “‘Ode to the West Wind,’” he said. “By Percy Blithe Shelley.”
My parents might have seen the priest in him then, the way he stood at the end of the table, offered up the lovely words.
I saw only, in my mind’s eye, a picture book illustration I had found somewhere, of a cruel face in the clouds, bloated cheeks and pursed lips that blew down upon the huddled figure of a man in a great dark overcoat.
“‘Oh, hear!’” my brother said, reciting, and then hesitated for a moment before he abruptly lifted a palm to the ceiling—a gesture he might have been instructed to make, at school, perhaps, although it did not suit him or his steady voice.
Without raising my chin, I looked around. Gabe had left half the cake on his plate. I knew he would eat it in a single, triumphant bite when he returned to his chair. My father’s slice was already gone. As was my mother’s. I looked at my own plate again, knowing full well I hadn’t left a crumb, and was surprised to discover there, in its center, another white sugar cube. I looked to my father, who only shifted his eyes briefly and briefly smiled. I looked to my mother, who was still studying the ruddy hands cupped in her lap, the thin gold band of her wedding ring. I snatched up the cube of sugar and quickly dropped it into the cooling dregs of my tea. My father whispered the last words of the poem as my brother recited them, and then, once more, my parents were quietly applauding.
My brother said, “‘Ozymandias,’” as I lifted my teacup again. I felt my mother’s finger against my thigh, a quick poke to remind me to listen.
I listened, my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, desert sand, sand of Syria and Mt. Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger. I was thinking of a baby wrapped in sparkling clothes, being pushed slowly in a white carriage, slowly through the city of light, toward Brooklyn, when I felt the sting of a slap against the back of my head and then its quick echo of pain. I pulled my finger from the cup. My mother hadn’t raised her eyes from her lap.
Gabe finished the poem and returned to his place at the table to drink down the cold tea and devour whole the bit of cake, his face flushed with his triumph. Patiently, my mother turned to me to ask what would happen if a teacup shattered while my fingers were inside it.
Some neighbor or faceless relation was named, a silly girl who’d “sliced herself good” with her hand inside a glass while she was washing up. A suggested image of soapy dishwater darkened with blood following me to the bath, where I watched my mother’s blurred red hand as it tested the seamless stream of steaming water.
I deployed all my excuses in a rush: the water was too hot, the house too cold, I’d had a bath last week, I had a stomach-ache, I was sleepy. But my mother had a grip on my arm, and my thin legs were all obedience. They raised themselves against my will, up over the cold rim of the high tub and into the steaming water, where the pain from the heat became a chill in my spine and my thin body—bright red to my calves but pale white, nearly blue, through my chest and my arms—became no more than a scrap of cloth, a scrap of cloth caught and shaken and snapped by a sudden wind. I wanted to weep. I wanted to be sick. I saw for a terrible moment that my body was a scrap of cloth, that my bones were no more than porcelain, as were my rattling teeth and the china skull that contained them. I saw how a hoop of light, the water’s shifting reflection, swung up to the top of the tile wall, and then swung down again, carrying me with it, nauseous and full of despair. I sat. The warm water covered my arms and touched my chin. My mother let go of my forearm, although the imprint of her grip lingered.
There, she said. There now. After all your fussing. You just have to get used to it.
In those days I still slept in the crib that had been my brother’s, in a corner of the small room I shared with him. A peeling lamb painted on the headboard, a blurred line of grass and meadow flowers at the foot. Low light. Prayers. My parents’ dry lips to my forehead and some single, barely whispered word at the end of the day that told me I was cherished above all things by these indistinct and warm-breathed shadows, leaning over me at the end of the day.
Gabe came in sometime later. Another blur of dar
kness and light—dark clothes and fair hair—coming in to take the pajamas out from under his pillow. When he returned, he was a brighter blur because he was dressed in them. Through the bars of the crib, I watched him kneel to say his prayers and then pull down his covers and climb into bed. He slept on his back, a wrist over his eyes, like another picture book illustration I had seen, of a laborer resting in a field. The light stayed on most of the night, and this gesture, his wrist thrown over his eyes, was his silent accommodation to my fear of the dark.
I woke to find the light had been put out. There were only the soft-edged, geometric patches of streetlight on the ceiling, across one wall. I threw a leg over the side of the crib, fitting my toe into the space between the bars, and carefully—I was not an athletic child—leaned to bring the other over. I lowered myself to the cold floor and then crossed it on tiptoe. Gabe opened his blankets for me in the same way he did everything: quietly, methodically, with a good-natured but stoic acquiescence to duty. A dutiful child. Wakeful himself at that hour.
I told him I’d had a bad dream, making it up as I went along: a terrible, white-fisted giant with swollen cheeks had carried me to a high, precarious place I could not climb down from, and Gabe listened carefully, commiserating briefly, marveling appreciatively each time I whispered, “And then,” adding another horror. He said, I never dream. I never have a dream that I remember. His features were a blur, although our faces were only inches apart. And yet the handsome, high-colored, precisely featured boy who was my brother during the day, the brother I saw with my glasses on, was far less familiar to me than this one of uncertain edges and soft darkness, with a spark of wet light in his mouth or his eye when he said that if I was good and didn’t kick, I could stay. I made my promises, and he accepted them, but he moved anyway to the far side of the narrow bed, all the way up to the wall—the wall we shared with the Chehabs’ building—turning his back to me and putting his hand on the cool plaster. The soft sheets retained their odor of sunshine against the warmer, closer scent of my brother’s scalp and breath and skin. With his back turned, he told me to say a prayer to keep the nightmares away. He said if I prayed, the Blessed Mother would keep the nightmares away.
Charming Billy Page 25