Florence Hogan when young, the tale began, could have charmed the birds out of the trees. But she was a big girl who grew up fast and couldn’t have been more than sixteen when she started going with an older man from no one knew where—White Plains, one of the Sisters offered with some authority, saying it as if the words carried the same impossible implications they would have held had she said Timbuktu or Siberia, or some other far-off place of sand or snow.
Oh, but he was good-looking, Mrs. Fagin said. Very tall and dark-haired. James Redmond was his name. There wasn’t a soul in the neighborhood who could help but notice the two of them when they walked down the street together, arm in arm … they must have kept company for a good year or so, going out together night after night … and here came among the women in Mrs. Fagin’s living room the silence and the long nod.
And then James Redmond disappeared from the neighborhood, and beautiful Florence, as large and as beautiful as ever, was seen walking on her own.
It was one of the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor—a chubby nun with a firm and serious face—who took up the tale then, because she remembered the Sister, her compatriot, who had attended Redmond Hogan’s birth twenty-five years ago. We were all leaning forward by now, although I suspect I was the only one among them who had never heard this before—a testament, perhaps, to my own naïveté or to the neighborhood’s ability to leave unspoken whatever it was that one of our members wished to remain unspoken.
It was Florence, the nun said matter-of-factly, who gave birth to her brother. Poor Redmond. God rest his soul. Mary Jane Hogan’s youngest child.
For a moment as I listened I feared that everything I thought I understood about babies being born was somehow wrong—the authority of the Sister’s simple words, spoken from inside the immaculate white wimple, was so great. She had to turn her head and shoulders in order to see me on the chair beside her. “The apple of his mother’s eye,” she said, glaring at me to make sure I heard.
I was on the stair, going back to my desk just beyond the cloakroom on Fagin’s parlor floor, before I understood that it was an impossible proposition: that Florence had given birth to her little brother. Although, even then, I couldn’t help but think that the real truth of the matter, biology be damned, was all on the nun’s side.
And then there was the bishop.
We had in one of the rooms a woman who had been the housekeeper at a nearby rectory. Margaret Tuohy. She was a small pale woman with beautiful black hair—not dyed, Fagin told me with some astonishment. She was a spinster. Her body had come from Brooklyn College Hospital’s morgue, but it seemed she’d been in the care of the Little Sisters right up until the end. It was one of them who came by the funeral parlor with the dress Fagin was to put on her: a clean and simple black shift with small polka dots, a churchgoing dress for a woman her age. But later that afternoon a dress box arrived by delivery truck—from Saks Fifth Avenue. Inside was a beautiful silk suit of deep blue, a white silk blouse, and a gold cross and chain, all meant for her. And not twenty minutes after it arrived, a phone call came from a priest with a voice like a radio announcer’s. He identified himself as the secretary to His Eminence Martin D. Tuohy in Connecticut. He wanted us to know that the bishop would be attending his sister’s wake that evening. He asked if we had received “the dress,” and full up as I was with all the excitement: the delivery from Saks, the visit from a bishop, I not only said yes, we had, but then went on to tell him how lovely it was, and to thank him profusely. He in turn—since we were both speaking as proxies—told me I was very welcome. He suggested that the gold cross and chain be donated to the missions when the wake was over.
The bishop had his sister’s pale skin and black, black hair, and I wondered as I greeted him—as close as I had come to a man of such stature since my own Confirmation—if she’d had his bright blue eyes as well. He was the cleanest-looking human being I had ever met. He wore his black cassock trimmed with red and his long red cloak, his skullcap, but it was his white skin and his clear eyes and his beautiful white hands that impressed me the most. He wasn’t a tall man—his secretary, who proved to be as handsome as his voice had implied, strong jawed and attentive, was a good head taller—but as he moved into the room where his sister was laid out, his presence changed the very air. There were other priests and Sisters there—Margaret Tuohy, after all, had long been in the employ of the Church—but none of them could retain their holy luster with the bishop in the room. He went to his sister’s coffin and knelt there, his head bent. We all watched silently. Even the soles of his shoes were immaculate, as if they’d just come out of the box. We saw him bless himself and then, for the first time, it seemed, look into the coffin. He reached out to touch his sister’s hand. Then, before he stood again, he looked over his shoulder to the handsome secretary and nodded, smiling a little. Expressing his approval, it seemed to me, of the lovely suit.
And then he was gone, sweeping out with the elegance and aplomb of an angel. Fagin was disappointed, I think. I think he was hoping that the bishop would stay to lead the Rosary. Instead, one of the old priests from her parish dispatched the prayers that night with mumbling speed, licking his finger and scratching at a pale white stain on his cassock through one whole decade. He was the same priest who said her funeral Mass the next day and accompanied the body to the cemetery, where a number of other Tuohys already lay. We didn’t see her brother again.
In Mrs. Fagin’s living room I felt the women recede as I told the story of the delivery from Saks, the handsome secretary, the clean and holy fragrance of the bishop’s cloak. I was enchanted still by the excitement of his visit, but as I described it, I noticed, too, how the women looked away now and then in the bright room, turning their chins into their shoulders the way workmen or baseball players or boys in the street might do as they prepared to spit.
“Martin Tuohy,” one of the old immigrant ladies said solemnly when I was finished, “has done very well for himself.” And the chorus of agreement with which this statement was met did not indicate approval. His family had been poor, they informed me. The poorest of the poor, they said. Coming to Brooklyn from the Lower East Side, living “from pillar to post” in any number of neighborhoods. The father a dockworker, when he worked. The mother a washerwoman, when she could. There had been other siblings, but they had disappeared long ago. Only Martin and Margaret left by the time they came to our neighborhood, Martin being “assumed”—I gathered they meant as in the Assumption—into the seminary not long after they arrived, still a boy.
I thought of Gabe, who was overseas by then, and the priest who had sat at our dining-room table, telling my parents over tea that there was clearly a vocation.
His sister Margaret, the women said, “putting it kindly,” hadn’t much wherewithal. Not a whit—they said—of her brother’s intelligence or good looks, which surprised me, since I had seen the resemblance between the two in the black hair and the pale skin. But I also knew something by then of how thin the line could be between the best-looking people who had all the advantages and the rest of us.
She had none of her brother’s instinctive refinement, either, they said.
“All dees, dems, and doses,” was how they described her. “A sweet soul,” they added, mitigating their own unkindness. “But you wouldn’t find her dancing at the Waldorf.” Nor attending, it seemed, her brother’s ordination, or elevation to bishop, or any of the elegant occasions of his rarefied career. He got her the job at the rectory, the women said, give him credit for that. But no one caught him stopping by to visit her in all these years, and when the Little Sisters who took care of her in her decline—it was cancer of the lower parts, they said—asked at the rectory if her brother the bishop shouldn’t be informed that the hour of her death was near, they were told by the parish priest, “It has been duly noted. Her brother is keeping her in his prayers.” She died without laying her eyes on anything but the big photograph she had of him in his cape and his cross, on a handful of news
paper clippings she had found here and there over the years, and on the impressive collection of Christmas tins that she kept on the mantel of her little room all year round—the tins that had held the fruitcakes her brother the bishop had sent her year after solitary year.
There was a sudden silence in Mrs. Fagin’s room. I was aware of the women touching teacups to their saucers, or folding and unfolding their hands.
Not that there was a drop of resentment in Margaret Tuohy, one of the nuns said softly. Simple soul that she was. She knew her brother was an important and holy man, busy with the Lord’s work.
Certainly, another said.
I felt their glances touching me from here and there. I felt them exchanging, through their glances, some communication with one another. I became aware of how rapturous I had been just moments before, describing the bishop’s visit, his clean hands, the lovely clothes he had sent. They were warning one another, I could tell, not to infect my awe of the man with their own clear-eyed assessment.
I said into their silence, “It was really a gorgeous suit. A blue like I’ve never seen. It must have cost a fortune.” Siding, I knew, with the elegant bishop and his handsome secretary.
The ladies murmured their responses, Oh, sure, no doubt, allowing me, I could tell, my right to be taken in.
But then little Mrs. Fagin, her feet barely touching the sunlit floor, raised her white eyebrows and smiled and crooned over her teacup, her brogue, I am certain, kicked up a notch, “Saks Fifth Avenue no less.”
The words put a stake through the heart of the bishop’s pretensions, and my own. In truth, Miss Tuohy’s body in its coffin had looked a bit lost in the blue silk of the suit. Her brother couldn’t have known, Fagin said, how her last illness had whittled her body to bone.
I bowed my head to take a sip of the cold, sweet tea, and when I looked up again, they were all smiling at me with their clear eyes, gracious and sorrowful and forgiving. Gently sorry, as was their way, for the silly child I was and perhaps would always be, enchanted by baubles, taken in by fools.
Of course, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the bishop’s sister’s fate and my own. Walking down Fagin’s dark staircase that afternoon, I imagined what the ladies in Mrs. Fagin’s living room would have to say about me were I to lose my footing à la Pegeen Chehab and fall fatally down the stairs. I suspected my poorr father would be mentioned (there would be the gesture of a raised glass), my poorr mother, yet another widow in her top-floor aviary (the rubbing, perhaps, of finger and thumb). I wondered if any of the ladies gathered upstairs had ever seen me walking out with Walter Hartnett.
But it was Gabe, I knew, who would give my brief life story the kind of turn that made the ladies lean forward … a handsome boy, his parents’ pride, and only a year at his first parish before he came back home without his collar. A mystery. I imagined them all—tiny Mrs. Fagin and her lace-curtain friends, the Sisters in their wimples or their caps—raising their eyebrows and letting their words fall off into that long nod … though I couldn’t say then what it might have meant.
I could not have said then if Gabe’s history added scandal to my own, or merely some pity. But I was certain they would know, the ladies in Fagin’s upper room. They would know the clear-eyed truth of it. And they would know as well how to choose their words to tell a kinder tale.
And then, of course, inevitably, given the size of the parish and Fagin’s steady business there, Walter Hartnett walked through the funeral parlor door.
It was at Bill Corrigan’s wake. It was one of the long winters during the war.
Only the week before, I had come up from the subway on a wet but warm Saturday evening after a day of spitting rain. It was the gulley of water at the curb that gave the first hint of something wrong. I had been downtown shopping all day, seeing Muriel at A&S and meeting Gerty and Durna for lunch. We had sat by the window in the restaurant, we had been in and out of the stores. It had not rained very hard downtown that day, and yet there was a river rush of water along the dark curb when I got out of the subway. When I turned the corner of my own street, I saw the fire truck under the streetlights. The firemen were still putting away their black hoses as I approached, and there were small knots of people still gathered on the sidewalk here and there. There were windows open in Bill Corrigan’s building, thin, pale curtains waved out from some of them. The first group I came to was made up of poor Mr. and Mrs. Chehab and some other neighbors, as well as Mrs. Shapiro, the landlady who lived on our parlor floor. I had the impression they’d been outside a long time, the way they huddled, and shivered. All the women had wrapped themselves in their own arms, holding their sweaters and coats tightly around their chests, grasping their own forearms and shoulders with hands made pale by the streetlight.
“It’s Bill,” Mrs. Shapiro said as I approached, hushed and astonished. “He put his head in the oven,” she said. “While his mother was out. Killed himself with the gas.”
Tall Mrs. Chehab looked down at me with her mouth closed tightly over her teeth and her eyes wide.
“There was a little explosion, I guess,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, “when they forced open the door. Stupid.” She touched her forehead. “The super couldn’t see, so he lit a match. The dope.”
“Idiot,” Mr. Chehab said angrily.
“He didn’t know,” another woman said.
“An explosion and a fire,” Mrs. Shapiro said again. She was a thin and wiry woman with a worn face. “They got the fire out pretty quickly. They just took the body away.” As she spoke, the fire truck, popping and wheezing, began to move.
Across the street a group of women were gathered around the steps of the house beside the Corrigans’. Old Mrs. Corrigan, in her hat and her coat as if she had just come home, was in the midst of them, sitting like a child on the stoop. A large woman sat beside her. Another, Mrs. Lee from the candy store, was crouching at her feet. My mother was there, too, leaning toward the old woman, who was shaking her head and beating her fist against her lap, a keening gesture I had come to know very well. There was a taste of the fire engine’s fuel in the wet air and, less precise, the taste of scorched wood. I could hear Mrs. Corrigan’s sobs from where I stood, and the women’s whispered urging to come inside, out of the cold and the damp. Mr. Chehab was saying in his gentle lilt, “Why in the world would he do such a thing? Why in the world?”
At my shoulder, Mrs. Shapiro held herself more tightly and shook her head and pinched her nostrils.
“It was a lonely life for him,” she said, finishing the tale.
Because this was one of the long winters during the war, the boys grown to men who had known Bill Corrigan for most of their lives were mostly elsewhere now, fighting. Gabe himself was at an air base in England. Bill Corrigan’s wake, then, was filled with the older people from the neighborhood, and the neighborhood girls like me, but few enough of the stickball kids who had first made him their umpire, their seer and their sage. Despite this, his mother, who I learned had for family only a sister and a niece from Greenpoint, wanted the three full days of viewing.
Because he had taken his life by his own hand, Bill Corrigan would have no funeral Mass at Mary Star of the Sea, and he could not be buried in Gate of Heaven, where his father and an infant brother lay. Although Mr. Fagin had turned away suicides before, Catholic suicides—no need to get on the wrong side of the Church—he reasoned that this three-day wake was all that Mrs. Corrigan would have, and he gave her the whole affair, coffin and all, gratis, in sympathy.
Bill was a veteran, after all, Mr. Fagin told me. He might have had a good life if he hadn’t gone over. It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is. There should be some accommodation for that fact, he said. Some bending. He struck his desk with his big hand.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “the damn Church is blind to life sometimes, blind.” And then blessed himself and begged my pardon. “And don’t dare tell anyb
ody I said so.”
It was the beginning of the evening of the second day of the wake. Because the parish priests had to show their disapprobation, it was Fagin who had led the Rosary the night before and would do so again tonight. There would be another crowd, mostly the same neighbors who had been here last night, many of whom had been here this afternoon as well. And would be again tomorrow. But for now it was just old Mrs. Corrigan with her stooped sister and her middle-aged niece, back from dinner and resettling themselves in the front row of chairs—but not before they had, it was a ritual I had observed many times by now, looked into the coffin again, as if to check for any changes while they were gone. I saw Mrs. Corrigan brush a bit of something, nothing most likely, from her big son’s lapel. Only a habit of mothering.
It was during Bill Corrigan’s wake that I considered for the first time what an effort of will it must have been for Mrs. Corrigan, over all these years, to keep her son in his neat suit and his pressed shirt and his polished shoes day after day. I wondered if it hadn’t been the suit all along that gave Bill Corrigan his skills as an umpire, his second sight—at least as far as the boys in the street were concerned. A transformation, it occurred to me then, not unlike the one Mr. Fagin’s five dresses had worked in my life.
I stood in the doorway as the three woman settled in. I still had my glasses on. I had added more remembrance cards to the small stand—Mrs. Corrigan had chosen one meant for children: a small boy with a great winged guardian angel by his side, knocking on heaven’s door—and I was just turning to a new page of the visitors’ book when I looked up and saw a subtle shift in the yellow sidelight beside the front door. A small shadow passing under the electric lamp at the entrance that to my now-practiced eye meant a visitor had arrived. Before I had a chance to take my glasses off, the big door was slowly pushed open and Walter Hartnett limped in. It was the limp, of course, I knew, that had kept him from the war.
Someone Page 12