In the car, Susan said again, “You told him you had that surgery, back when?”
“Of course,” I told her. “They took a full history.” I had begun to feel responsible, nevertheless, for the doctor’s mistake. Easy enough conclusion to reach when you were an old woman living on your own. Living on a ledge of this high precarious place. Perhaps I had confused left and right, as I had done so often as a child.
Susan banged the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Fuck,” she said. “He did the wrong eye.”
I had long ago stopped reprimanding my children for their language—quoting Mrs. Fagin with my finger raised. The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.
Susan said, “I told you we should have gone into the city for this. These suburban doctors are money crazed. You saw how he ran the place. Like a factory.”
“I’ll have a transplant, then,” I said casually. Knowing I wouldn’t. A cornea peeled off a corpse, after all the corpses I’d seen? Not likely.
“We should take him to court,” my daughter said. “Sue him for malpractice.”
I said, “What’s done is done.”
But Susan pushed on. “I’m serious,” she said. “He clearly fucked up. And now we’ll have to find another doctor—we’re going into the city this time—and you’ll have to go through another surgery. And I’ll have to take more time off from work.” As if each item implied equal effort on all parts. “There are damages here. Seriously, we should sue.”
I was thinking of the high, precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no. I was recalling myself in that ancient city hospital with my eyes bound in tape, calling into an empty room. Not empty, though, not that time.
We were pulling into the driveway. It had been years since we had gotten rid of the carport, and yet I realized I had been anticipating getting out of the car under its shade. Easier on my eyes.
“What do you think?” Susan asked.
I was thinking of the years that had passed since we’d taken down that old carport, and how foolish I’d been to have forgotten, or confused, the time I now lived in. A notion better kept to myself. I told her, “My brother sometimes said, ‘A fool’s thoughts are in his mouth.’ I think it was from the Bible.”
“Jesus, Mom,” Susan muttered. “Don’t quote me Uncle Gabe blade, tell me what you want to do.” There was the slap and then the sharp echoing pain. A sudden stillness in the car. I had heard my children use the phrase before, joking between themselves. I knew they meant no harm. It was how they looked at the world. “Sorry,” my daughter said brusquely. “But I’m serious. What just happened to you is very wrong. How much longer do you think you’ll be able to live alone here if you lose an eye. It could start you on a real decline.” I felt her hand against my own. “I just think someone should be made to pay for all the inconvenience you’ll be put through. I seriously think you should seek some consolation.”
I shook my head against her earnestness. There was something of my brother in her certainty about the way the world should run. “Nonsense,” I told her. And tried to laugh. “I don’t need consolation.”
I heard her sigh with false patience. “Compensation!”—shouting it. “I think you should seek some compensation. For pain and suffering.”
I laughed again, sincerely this time. “Not much chance of that,” I told her. “Not in this life.”
Inside, she fixed me a cup of tea and a hastily arranged ham sandwich. I settled on the couch in the sunroom with a blanket and a pillow. My daughter kissed the top of my head. “You’ll be all right?” Of course, I understood it wasn’t an honest answer she was looking for.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You’d better run.”
“Helen will be by this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll stop by in the morning.”
“You are good girls,” I told her.
I closed my eyes. I was aware of my daughter’s broad frame standing over me. She wore a dark business suit. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, about Uncle Gabe,” she said, but then added with a laugh, “We’re all pretty sure he was gay.”
I had heard these discussions before among my children. There was a lightness to them, a buoyant interest, as if they were talking about a character on TV. I put my wrist over my eyes to show her I was tired.
I said, “I don’t see the world the way you kids do.”
Susan said, turning away, “Sometimes you don’t see it at all,” getting the last word. I had to laugh at that. She was my daughter.
“Is it you again?” the young man said, bowing a bit before he took the chair beside me. “I think we met before. I knew your brother.”
But my glasses were in my purse, and even if I’d had them on, I would not have made the connection between this thin blur of a young man and the chubby, florid guy who—he said now—could have bitten his tongue when he once again called my brother “Father,” even after Gabe had so politely explained that this was no longer the case. On Court Street, before the war.
“Would it be impolite of me to ask what happened?” he said. “Why he left? He seemed like a good priest. He always gave a good sermon.”
“Well, yes, it would,” I said, and then relented, because he had, after all, crossed the room—a crowded hotel party, a homecoming for some boy I barely knew, the friend of a friend of Gerty’s—just to sit beside me. “It wasn’t for him,” I said. And then, relenting further, “He once said it was because they threatened to throw him out of the seminary for smoking. He said after that he couldn’t light up without questioning his vocation.”
He had a round, gullible face. “No kidding.”
I waved my hand. I decided I might as well put my glasses on. I had no interest in someone with so little sense of humor.
“Just joking,” I said, and took them from my purse. On occasion I had heard my mother say to those who persisted that Gabe had come home to take care of his mother, after our father died, What else could a loving son do? But I was not inclined to risk foolish tears, mentioning such a thing to this slip of a stranger.
Seen clearly, he was indeed thin, his collar didn’t touch his neck, and as a result the knot of his tie seemed somehow unanchored. I had the impression that inside his clothes his flesh was a good inch or so away from the fabric. There were shadows in his cheeks that I had at first attributed to my eyesight, but that I could see now were actual and his own. Even the cuffs of his suit jacket and his shirt seemed too large for him. His hands beneath them were childishly pale.
“Did you just get home?” I asked, relenting again. I was beginning to recognize the look of a GI who’d had a tough time in the war.
“A while ago,” he said, and pulled his lips down in a clownish frown. Then he raised his hand and passed it in front of his face—the comic routine—and he was grinning at me. He had lovely small white teeth.
“Where were you stationed?” I asked, but he shook his head with a brief, Bogey grimace and asked instead, “What’s your brother up to now?”
I told him he was home with us, back at his old job, thinking about college.
“Married?” he asked, and when I said, “Not yet,” he nodded as if he understood something I might not. “Once a priest, always a priest,” he said, with more wisdom than I was willing to allow him.
I swatted my hand to brush the platitude away. “Oh, he’s got a string of girlfriends,” I said, and saw by the way he dropped his eyes to the drink in his hand that I had embarrassed him.
He bowed his head to sip from his glass. There was the awkwardness of a halting conversation with a stranger in a crowded room—would it continue or would one of us soon turn away? Gerty and the two other girls I had come with were somewhere in the crowd. Were he to turn away, I would be left sitting alone.
“And what about you?” I asked him, mostly because I did not want to end up sitting here alone,
but also because there was the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who so clearly had had a tough time in the war.
He held up his hands and said, “No strings of girlfriends here.” The blush was visible even beneath his thinning hair.
Which made me blush in turn. This was not going well. “I meant work,” I said. “Are you back to work?”
He nodded. “Back doing my patriotic duty,” he said, saluting, “brewing beer,” and with that the recollection stirred itself and I knew for certain what day it had been when my brother and I had met him on the street, late August, Court Street, before the war.
Later that same night I asked him, “How did you know me? After just one meeting, after all that while?”
I was giving him the opportunity to say, Oh, I knew you. I’ve remembered you across all these years. But he laughed and confessed he hadn’t known me at all. That he’d been sitting with a group across the room and one of the girls was filling everybody in on who was who—pointing her bouncing finger here and there around the room and finally coming to me. He made the connection with the young priest he’d once known, the priest he’d once run into on the street, no collar, no longer a priest at all. He asked and learned that yes, indeed, Gabe was my brother.
And then he had crossed the room to introduce himself: Tom Commeford, although I had not remembered the name.
We were at the foot of our stoop. He had taken me home from the hotel, and we had already agreed to see a movie together on my next night off. He’d laughed when I told him where I worked, because, he said—wasn’t it funny how things turn out—it was a wake at Fagin’s funeral parlor that had brought him to Court Street that hot afternoon in August, before the war.
Standing in the subway coming home, he had leaned toward my ear and said, “Aren’t we in the same profession more or less: biers and beers, stiffs and getting stiff, waking and going out like a light.” He might have gone on like that if I hadn’t lost my balance as the car shifted and grabbed his arm. He had patted my hand reassuringly.
He was thin, no more than an inch or two taller than I, balding and round-faced. He should have said, more gallantly, “Oh, I’ve remembered you all along.”
He lifted his hat with one hand as he put out the other to say, “I’m very glad to have met you,” there in the streetlight in front of our house. “To have met you again,” he added.
I took his hand and surprised myself by saying, “Would you like to come up? Gabe would love to see you.”
He shook his head. “Oh, he won’t remember me.”
I looked over my shoulder to see that the light was on in my brother’s bedroom. He would be reading. He hardly slept for all his reading. He had plans to go to college. “Gabe remembers everyone,” I said. “He has the knack.”
And he smiled at me with his beautiful teeth. “I’ll just say a quick hello.”
Climbing the stairs behind me, he said, jovially, “Your mother’s not Italian, is she?” And I paused at the first landing to look back at him. Under the brim of his fedora, his face was flushed. He seemed a little breathless. “I only know Italian girls named Marie,” he said, his hand on the banister, his voice trailing.
What the question revealed was that he had been thinking of my name as we climbed the stairs: not of the state of the apartment house, which was looking, I thought, a little shabby under the care of a new landlord, or the shape of my rump, or the lateness of the hour, or even of the possibility of a drink being offered once we got upstairs, but of me, my name. Four steps below me when we paused, he now doffed his hat, his face raised to mine, and it was the same sudden panic that had entered his eyes when, back on that summer day, he had misspoken again, called my brother Father again. “Was that a rude question?” he said softly, a history of his own social failings, or, perhaps, of his own failed offers of affection and friendship now in his voice. He shifted his feet. “I don’t have anything against Italians,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. He smiled at me, still uncertain, still in the dark, but grateful to follow my lead. “It’s George M. Cohan,” I said.
He said, “Ah,” and nodded, as if he understood precisely what I meant, but the pretense lasted hardly a moment. His face fell again. He was, perhaps, incapable of deception. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“Don’t you know the song?” I asked him. It was as if all his uncertainty had given me permission to be assured. I hummed a little. “ ‘But with propriety, society will say Marie.’ The way my father told it, I was going to be Mary until my mother heard that line and decided society and propriety were really what she was after—’Blessed Virgin Mary, stand aside’—as my father said.”
And I made note, obliquely, that my voice did not catch, no foolish tears. I suddenly felt peculiarly happy, although the drinks at the party had been well watered. “So, no, not Italian,” I said, a little more kindly than before. I smiled down at this poor young guy, shrunken inside his clothes. “Just lace-curtain pretension,” I said. “Both my parents were Irish born.”
The delight, and the relief, on his face made me laugh again. “No kidding,” he said. “Mine, too. What a coincidence.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Some coincidence. Two New Yorkers with Irish parents.” And began to climb again.
“Not that I knew them,” he said from behind me. “My Irish parents. I’m a foundling-home kid, truth be told.”
Once more I paused on the stair to look at him. I wondered suddenly if it was childhood neglect that had shaped him, not the war at all. But he was smiling. “It’s not a sad tale,” he said. “I never knew them. My parents. They were actors. Vaudeville. My mother was a beauty with a voice like an angel. My father was a dancing man. They left me at a rooming house on Tenth Avenue and continued on their tour.”
“That’s awful,” I said, and he shook his head. “There were at least six other kids I knew growing up who had been told the same story. Vaudeville, voice like an angel, Tenth Avenue, and all. I think half the nuns who ran the place were former chorus girls.” He grinned.
“Were you never adopted?” I asked. There was the tug of sympathy, but also some wariness, I must admit. I had read far enough into David Copperfield by then to know a hard-luck childhood could portend a hard-luck life.
“We were only a few days from getting on a train, to be sent out West,” he said. “Me and some buddies. I was nearly ten. I might have ended up some kind of farmer in the Wild West—can you imagine me in a ten-gallon hat?—but Sister Saviour—now there’s a name—held me back. She had a widowed sister in East New York who had just lost a son, older than me, her only child. A teenager. Poor kid drowned out in Rockaway. So I went out and lived with her. She had a very nice place. Very clean.” He grinned again.
“That couldn’t have been easy,” I said. Standing above him just those few steps made me feel taller and wiser. Even in the ugly light of the stairway, he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child’s.
He shook his head. “She was a very nice lady. Very refined. God rest her soul. I got no complaints there.”
We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit—the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more likely his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.
At the door of the apartment he said, “I’ll just have a few words and be on my way. I won’t wear out my welcome.” He said, as I opened the door, “Just a quick hello.”
But he was not, I was learning, a man of a single word—of any single word. I placed him on the couch in the living room and walked quietly through the darkened bedroom where my mother was asleep. I knocked on Gabe’s door and whispered Tom Commeford’s name. He looked up from his book and frowned. “One of the brewery guys,
” I said.
When Gabe walked out into the light of the living room, it was clear that he did indeed remember the man. “What do you know,” he said, pointing at him, then offering his hand.
“Small world,” Tom said, and swept his hand across the air, as if to indicate the narrow room itself. “After all these years.”
I told them both to sit at the table while I put the kettle on. And it was the smell of the toast I thought to make for them, burning under the broiler, that brought my mother out of the bedroom in her robe and her long braid, and gave Gabe the opportunity to tell Tom, “My sister’s helpless in the kitchen. Fair warning.”
It was a kind of party, then: the three of us at the dining-room table while my mother made tea and toast and—“Well, yes, thank you, if it’s not too much trouble”—fried some eggs and some slices of ham, as if she recognized, too, in the first moments of their introduction, how little substance this stranger had under his suit.
She placed it all on a warmed platter, eggs, ham, toast, while I set the table.
The two men compared their years in the war. They had both been in England, at two different air bases, although Tom had flown, Gabe had not. There was much back and forth between the two of them as my mother and I listened. Tom had been a radio operator, he said, and with a mouth full of toast and egg, he casually revealed that he’d spent seven months in a German POW camp near the Baltic. He shrugged, glanced at me apologetically when I said, “My goodness.” The food there didn’t much agree with him, he said—you’d never catch him eating another rutabaga—but the company was good. He smiled at us with his small teeth. “Roll call twice a day, but after that, not much to do. Terrible boredom.”
He painted pictures there, he told us. A way to pass the time. A Red Cross package had arrived with watercolors. One guy was talented. He gave the others lessons. Only Tom stuck with them. Everything he drew was lopsided somehow, but he liked doing it.
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