I felt a twinge of envy, fool that I was in these first moments of my first foray into love’s irrational pains. Envy for the widowed mother who had known him all his life, who had heard his first words, dried his first tears—had they been for the shortened leg?—even envied the mustachioed father, now buried in Calvary, where my father, too, had gone, envied every happy moment Walter had lived that had no trace of me in it.
I heard his voice coming from the back of the apartment. He was on the phone. He seemed to be speaking seriously, repeating numbers. Was it his important job? Even now I can’t say whether or not the phone call was a ruse. I suspect he wasn’t that clever.
I returned to the couch. When he came back into the living room, he was carrying two opened bottles of beer. He offered and I refused, laughing a little at what struck me as the preposterousness of it, and he looked at the brown bottle and said, “Oh, but it’s already opened.” As if I had broken a promise. He placed the rejected beer on the radiator cover beside him and then moved to the couch. He sat next to me.
“My mother should be back soon,” he said, looking me over as if for the first time: my throat, my blouse, my belt, my hands in my lap. “She’ll want to say hello to you,” he said.
I nodded, pointed to the portraits on the small table. “Is that her wedding picture?” I asked, and he said, “Yeah.”
“She was pretty,” I said.
“I wouldn’t mind getting married,” he told me. And then took a drink of his beer. He began to talk about his job again. What a good job it was. What a great office. What an easy thing it would be for him to begin to save his money to get a nice place of his own. When he got married. He sat very close to me. Did I want to get married? he asked, and when I said, Sure I did, someday, that slow, delighted recognition in his eyes fell on me again. He leaned away as if to see me better. We might have been the only two people in all the vast universe who agreed that we would like to get married someday, he took such pleasure in my answer.
And children? he asked. Did I want to have children?
Well, sure.
Well, sure. His eyes, darker now in the dim light of the apartment, were on me alone, were all over my face, as if I, after all, was what they’d been searching for all evening.
When he leaned to kiss me, it was both my first real kiss and my first taste of beer. He held the opened bottle against my shoulder for a minute as he pressed toward me, dampening my blouse, so that there was the strong smell of beer as well as the light taste of it in my mouth. Then he lowered his arm across my lap to put the bottle on the floor and, moving up again, put his hand over my breast. Astonished and, perhaps, afraid—already I had learned the triumph and distress of his veering attentions—I made no move. Delicately—I thought at first that he was making an “okay” sign with thumb and forefinger just over my heart—he unbuttoned my shirt and then slipped his fingers inside. He pushed my bra aside. Exposed to the shadowy room, my breast seemed lit with its own light. He sighed and bowed his head. I felt the momentary terror of not knowing what he was going to do as he moved his mouth toward me and then felt it increase a hundredfold when I understood. He closed his mouth over my nipple. He pulled and tugged.
Of course, I had seen women nursing babies here and there, in closed-off rooms, and it was the recollection of this that muddled my emotions now. He breathed deeply, like an infant nursing, and I felt the warm air of his nostrils on my skin. I put a hand to his hair. Was this wrong? If I stopped him now, would he look at me again with that icy indifference, let his eyes drift away?
He put his hand to my spine and pressed me toward him. I felt his saliva turn cold on my skin, even as the room seemed to grow warmer around us. I felt his teeth on my flesh, lightly at first, but then in a stinging vise that made me pull in my breath. He clamped harder and I cried out, which only made him turn his head slightly as if to get a better grip on me with his molars. He might have drawn blood if there hadn’t been the sudden slam of the door in the downstairs vestibule. He paused, lifted his head. Slam of the interior door and maybe footsteps across the foyer. He said, “Cover up,” and then reached across my lap for the beer on the floor.
My poor pale breast was soggy and tender, the pink nipple distended, frighteningly transformed. I fumbled for my buttons. He leaned back on the couch, seemed to roll himself off it, the beer in one hand and the other hand pressed to his thigh. He walked, stooped, really limping now, toward the bottle he had left on the radiator. But then we heard the rattle of keys and another door opening on a floor below. He cursed and, with his back to me, hung his head, shaking it sorrowfully. And then without another word he limped out of the room again.
For a few minutes I sat alone under the shaded light. I felt it possible that he would not return. I felt for certain a warm trickle of blood was moving down my chest. When he came back, he seemed to have washed himself, hands and face, and combed water through his hair. He no longer had the bottle of beer, but he swung the second one off the radiator cover and carried it to the thick chair on the other side of the room. He sank into it and took a long drink. “When we get married,” he said, “you’re probably going to want to live on the parlor floor. Baby carriages and all. But I think it’s cheap. Everybody and his brother walking by your door. I think it’s better to be up high.” He finished off the bottle in two or three long gulps and put his hand to his chest and quietly belched, as if we were already married, and perhaps had been for quite some time. “I guess you’d better go,” he said amicably.
We walked down the stairs. I felt a panic at each turning—what if his mother came through the door now, or now, what would she read on our faces? But he took his time. On the street—the air was lovely, a slight breeze had kicked up and it felt like bathwater against my skin—he put his arm around my waist as we walked. We passed the church. Had it only been this morning that he looked down at me with the sunlight across his face and asked, “What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Well, at least,” he said, “we won’t have to fight over whose church we’ll get married in, yours or mine. Both our mothers will be happy. What do you have,” he asked, “one more year till graduation, right?”
I said yes.
“Get a job downtown Brooklyn,” he said. “You don’t want to go into New York City.”
We came around the other side of the block. Mr. and Mrs. Chehab were in the bay window of the parlor floor, their backs to the street and a two-headed lamp between them. He paused at our steps.
“Here you are,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets and shifted a little bit on his uneven legs. He may have been feeling the two quick bottles of beer. There was another couple walking down the other side of the street, toward the subway, and his eyes followed. This time, I turned to gaze at them, too. The woman wore a tight skirt across a wide bottom and her heels were clicking. The man’s suit jacket was long, with a belt across the back. Together Walter and I turned to face each other again, but this time he did not go through that momentary, disinterested amnesia. Rather, he raised his chin and shot a finger into the air—as he’d done all evening when he acknowledged people in the candy store and on the street—a wordless “I know you”—and then let his eyes fall, and linger, on my breast, the one he had exposed and suckled. He grinned. I know you.
In the first throes of my first foray into love’s irrational joys, I felt both the thrill of his acknowledgment and the hot black rush of shame.
“Go on in,” he said, touching my hip. “Go tell your mother you’ve got a boyfriend.”
All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and the philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say—Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be—the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place—missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer
before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive.
Driving back from Calvary Cemetery in the undertaker’s car, pressed into my mother’s side, I had sunk into the sweetest sleep I had ever known. They had put my father in the ground and my world was shattered, but the nap I had in Fagin’s car driving home was like a long draft of cool nectar—sweet and deep and fragrant, washed with an ivory light (was it the winter sun passing through the window?)—the kind of sleep that came only in the aftermath of many tears. When the car pulled to the curb in front of the restaurant where the funeral luncheon was to be held, my mother gently woke me. Only Gabe, in his Roman collar, disapproved. His own eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot; there were hollows in his pale cheeks. “You slept?” he said. He had ridden in front, beside the driver. “How could you have slept?”
Now, lying beside my mother in the bed we shared because Gabe had come home from his first parish, saying only that the priesthood was not for him, I passed my life’s first sleepless night in joy and shame and confusion. I could not put my hand to my tender breast—bruised (I had seen in the bathroom mirror as I undressed) around the nipple, marked with two rose-colored bites—in case my mother, even in the shadows, should see what I was doing. I could not tamp down the smoldering shame. I felt it coil, wire-thin, down my spine. I felt it touch or spark something that flared and flashed and made guilt and confusion feel like pleasure, like joy. I was in love. Walter Hartnett with the gray eyes loved me. Next year we would be married in Mary Star of the Sea and those eyes would never again fall on me with cold indifference. I know you.
My mother said, in the darkness, “Do you want some hot milk, Marie?”
“No,” I said.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“No,” I said.
“Can you at least try to be still?” my mother said. “It’s three a.m. I’ve got to work in the morning.”
“Sorry,” I whispered.
The ticking of the bedside clock had never before sounded so cruel. The windows were broad, uneven strokes of pale gray, hastily painted on the long black wall beyond the bed. The windows were opened to the cool night, but no particular breeze stirred. What sounds came from the street were distant, indistinguishable. Not even the scratching of a mouse behind the walls or of my brother’s cough from the next room. Everyone else on this street was still. Everyone else had fallen into the cool ivory light, fallen asleep.
“Is Walter Hartnett a nice boy?” my mother whispered.
I said, “Yes,” but could add nothing more. Already I felt the hot flush on my cheeks.
My mother rolled over, bouncing the mattress we shared, and then pulled the thin sheet up over her shoulder. “I like his mother,” she said. “Her people are from Armagh.”
By month’s end, he was riding the extra stop on the subway every night on the way home from work, walking past our house, where he would always pretend to be surprised to find me sitting on the steps, waiting for him. He would lean against the balustrade, cock the toe of his built-up shoe into the sidewalk, and talk about his work, our wedding, the guys he wouldn’t want to be, his eyes sliding, always, from my face to my breast and then rising up to my face again, his eyebrows raised as if to say, “Remember?” As if the flush that rose to my cheeks didn’t tell him I remembered.
We went to the movies together and a party once, where he drank half a bottle of whiskey and leaned heavily into my side walking home. We took a drive in a caravan of cars to a summer place owned by one Judge Sweeney, whose daughter went with a guy Walter knew. We had a picnic on a lovely lawn, but were only allowed into the house to use the john. Driving back, he said, “Maybe we should get a place like that instead.”
I put my hand through his arm when we walked together, or he put his arm around my waist. He put his arm across my shoulders in the movie theater. At the end of the night, he would kiss me gently, always standing on the sidewalk, at the foot of our steps, never at the door, because, I imagined, he did not want me to turn and watch him limp back down the wide stair.
Even now I can’t say if it was lack of opportunity or part of some plan, but the intimacy of that first Sunday evening was never repeated. And yet it was always there, in every touch that passed between us, certainly in every gesture of his pale eyes. The hours I spent on that first sleepless night imagining what I would say or do when he moved his mouth toward me again gave way to sleepless nights in which I only recollected in lovely detail everything he’d done once, teeth and tongue, his fingers on my spine. I walked beside him in a state of tremulous anticipation. I felt the pulse thrum in my veins every time we neared his block together—would this be the night he would finally say again, “Do you want to come in?” Leaving the party where he’d had too much to drink, he’d leaned heavily against my shoulder in a dark and momentarily deserted vestibule, and for a moment his head dropped onto my chest, his hair brushed my chin, and it was all I could do not to cup my breast myself, offer it to him. On the parklike lawn of Judge Sweeney’s summer house he’d stretched out on the grass beside me, propped on his elbows. He was chatting with the others, and his cheek against my forearm as he spoke and chewed and laughed, the movements of his jaw, filled me with an unbearable recollection of the dark couch and the amber lamp and the bared breast, lit as if from within.
It was the very end of summer when he called to say, “Meet me for lunch downtown, will you?”
I hardly knew what I was hoping for, but before I left, I changed from a sleeveless polished-cotton sheath with a zipper up the back to a striped shirtwaist with buttons and a patent-leather belt. I wore new shoes and new gloves and a new slip and a new hat with red trim. I got to the restaurant before he did and sat alone at a table, which I had never done before, the water glasses throwing off trembling hoops of light because of the tremor in my legs beneath the white tablecloth, beneath the striped skirt, beneath the pink slip. I saw him come in—handsome, in a suit I had not seen him wear before, tweedy linen with a pinched waist and a belt across the back—and then I took off my glasses and smiled up in his direction until the shape of him materialized across the short table. “Pretty hat,” he said, and pulled out his chair. “Isn’t this some place? Put your glasses back on, I don’t know you without them.”
I had been here three years before, for my father’s funeral luncheon, but this was not yet something I could say without my voice breaking.
I put my glasses back on and said, “Pretty suit.”
He held out his arms. “You like it?” He grinned. He was an ordinary-looking boy with brown hair and somewhat remarkable gray eyes. But handsome today in the suit, the white shirt, and pale tie. He had small straight teeth. Nice ears. “I borrowed it from a buddy of mine,” he said, “cause I’m on my way up to Judge Sweeney’s summer place for the weekend.”
I leaned my gloved hands against the table edge, pressed the buttons of my shirtwaist against them. “Whatever for?” I said.
His eyes skimmed over mine and then bounced away to follow the rise and fall of his napkin as he shook it out. “Looks like me and Rita Sweeney are getting married,” he said, and tucked the napkin onto his lap.
It was surely an image from a children’s cartoon, maybe from one I had seen in the movies, with Walter or with someone else, but in my recollection of that hour, I saw the tears flow freely from my eyes and fill up behind my glasses like water in two fishbowls. Because I knew I cried, and yet no tear fell.
It wasn’t just that Rita’s family had some money, he explained while he ate and the food he had ordered for me sat untouched on my plate. Although she was better off than the two of us, with our two widowed mothers ending up alone in their top-floor aviaries if we got married. It was simply that Rita was better-looking, really. No flaws that he could see. Not, he said, like you and me.
“Blind you,” he said. “Gimpy me.”
He said, as the lunch wore on, “D
on’t kid yourself that everybody’s equal in this country. It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.”
He said, “I’m giving my future children the best chance I can give them. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t?”
The tears rocked like the sea behind my glasses.
He said, “You’ve been swell. I wanted to give you a nice lunch.”
I walked back to the subway with the tears that were trapped under my glasses washing up over my eyes. Through them, I saw the buildings and the streetlamps and the cars with their bright windshields, even the dark slips of other people, grow buoyant. I saw them float past, clashing and bobbing, unmoored by the flood.
At home, I climbed the steps, and everything that was terrible about this house and this street, about my life thus far, washed before my eyes: Here was the turn in the stair where Fagin’s men had struggled with my father’s coffin. Here was the couch where I had found my mother one morning last year, counting the pile of wrinkled dollars in her lap, hollow-eyed and sleepless. Here was the bed that had once belonged to my parents but that now my mother and I shared because Gabe had lost his vocation.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of my spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.
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