Brooklyn (12 page)

Although the first table had not been filled, she turned and went back to the kitchen and set about checking the number of plates for the first serving, even though she knew she had the right number, and then lifting the lid of the huge saucepan to check if the Brussels sprouts were boiling, even though she knew that the water was not hot enough yet. When one of the Miss Murphys asked her if the nearest table had been filled up and if every man had a glass of stout, Eilis turned and said that she had done her best to move the men to the tables but maybe Miss Murphy could do better. She tried to smile, hoping that Miss Murphy did not notice anything strange.

For the next two hours she was busy, piling food on to plates, carrying them out two at a time. Father Flood carved turkeys and hams as they arrived, piling stuffing and roast potatoes into bowls. For a while, one Miss Murphy devoted herself entirely to washing up and drying and cleaning and clearing space as her sister and Eilis served the men, making sure to leave nothing out-turkey, ham, stuffing, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts-and making sure in their haste not to give anyone too much or too little.

"There's plenty of food now, so don't worry," Father Flood shouted, "but no more than three potatoes a head and go easy on the stuffing."

When they had enough meat carved, he went outside and busied himself opening more bottles of stout.

At first the men seemed shabby to Eilis and she noticed body odours from a good number of them. As they sat down and drank their stout waiting for the soup or the food, she could not believe there were so many of them, some of them so poor-looking and so old, but even the younger ones had bad teeth and appeared worn down. Many were still smoking, even as the soup came. She did her best to be polite to them.

She observed a change in them soon, however, as they began to talk to each other or shout greetings down the table or enter into low, intense conversations. At first they had reminded her of men who sat on the bridge in Enniscorthy or gathered at the seat at Arnold 's Cross or the Louse Bank by the Slaney, or men from the County Home, or men from the town who drank too much. But by the time she served them and they turned to thank her, they seemed more like her father and his brothers in the way they spoke or smiled, the toughness in their faces softened by shyness, what had appeared stubborn or hard now strangely tender. As she served the man she had thought was her father, she looked at him carefully, amazed at how little he actually resembled him, as though it had been a trick of the light or something she had completely imagined. She was surprised also to find that he was talking to the man beside him in Irish.

"This was the miracle of the turkey and the ham," Miss Murphy said to Father Flood when large plates of second helpings had been left on all the tables.

"Brooklyn-style," her sister said.

"I'm glad it's trifle now," she added, "and not plum pudding and we don't have to worry about keeping it hot."

"Wouldn't you think they'd take off their caps when they are eating?" her sister asked. "Don't they know they're in America?"

"We have no rules here," Father Flood said. "And they can smoke and drink all they like. If we can get them all home safely, that's the main thing. We always have a few a bit too under the weather to go home."

"Too drunk," one Miss Murphy said.

"Ah, on Christmas Day we call it under the weather, and I have a rake of beds made up for them in my own house," Father Flood said.

"What we'll do now is have our own dinner," Miss Murphy said. "And I'll set the table and I've kept a nice dinner for each of us hot and everything."

"Well, I was wondering if we were going to eat at all," Eilis said.

"Poor Eilis. She's starving. Will you look at her?"

"Should we not serve the trifle first?" Eilis asked.

"No, we'll wait," Father Flood said. "It'll stretch the day out."

By the time they were removing the trifle dishes, the hall was a mass of smoke and animated talk. Men sat in groups with one or two standing behind them; others moved from group to group, some with bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags that they passed around. When all the cleaning of the kitchen and the filling of garbage cans had been completed, Father Flood suggested that they go into the hall and join the men for a drink. Some visitors had arrived, including a few women, and Eilis thought, as she sat down with a glass of sherry in her hand, that it could have been a parish hall anywhere in Ireland on the night of a concert or a wedding when the young people were all elsewhere dancing or standing at the bar.

After a while Eilis noticed that two men had taken out fiddles and another a small accordion; they had found a corner and were playing as a few others stood around and listened. Father Flood was moving about the hall with a notebook now, writing down names and addresses and nodding as old men spoke to him. After a while he clapped his hands and called for silence but it took a few minutes before he could get everyone's attention.

"I don't want to interrupt the proceedings," he said, "but we'd like to thank a nice girl from Enniscorthy and two nice women from Arklow for their hard day's work."

There was a round of applause.

"And, as a way of thanking them, there's one great singer in this hall and we're delighted to see him this year again."

He pointed to the man whom Eilis had mistaken for her father. He was sitting away from Eilis and Father Flood, but he stood up when his name was called and walked quietly towards them. He stood with his back to the wall so that everyone could see him.

"That man," Miss Murphy whispered to Eilis, "has made LPs."

When Eilis looked up the man was signalling to her. He wanted her, it seemed, to come and stand with him. It struck her for a second that he might want her to sing so she shook her head, but he kept beckoning and people began to turn and look at her; she felt that she had no choice but to leave her seat and approach him. She could not think why he wanted her. As she came close she saw how bad his teeth were.

He did not greet her or acknowledge her arrival but closed his eyes and reached his hand towards hers and held it. The skin on the palm of his hand was soft. He gripped her hand tightly and began to move it in a faint circular motion as he started to sing. His voice was loud and strong and nasal; the Irish he sang in, she thought, must be Connemara Irish because she remembered one teacher from Galway in the Mercy Convent who had that accent. He pronounced each word carefully and slowly, building up a wildness, a ferocity, in the way he treated the melody. It was only when he came to the chorus, however, that she understood the words-"Má bhíonn tú liom, a stóirín mo chroí"-and he glanced at her proudly, almost possessively, as he sang these lines. All the people in the hall watched him silently. There were five or six verses; he sang the words out with pure innocence and charm so that at times, when he closed his eyes, leaning his large frame against the wall, he did not seem like an old man at all; the strength of his voice and the confidence of his performance had taken over. And then each time he came to the chorus he looked at her, letting the melody become sweeter by slowing down the pace, putting his head down then, managing to suggest even more that he had not merely learned the song but that he meant it. Eilis knew how sorry this man was going to be, and how sorry she would be, when the song had ended, when the last chorus had to be sung and the singer would have to bow to the crowd and go back to his place and give way to another singer as Eilis too went back and sat in her chair.

As the night wore on, some of the men fell asleep or had to be helped to the toilet. The two Miss Murphys made pots of tea and there was Christmas cake. Once the singing ended some of the men found their coats and came up to thank Father Flood and the Miss Murphys and Eilis, wishing them a happy Christmas before setting out into the night.

When most of the men had left and several who remained seemed to be very drunk, Father Flood told Eilis that she could go if she wanted and he would ask the Miss Murphys to accompany her to Mrs. Kehoe's house. Eilis said no, she was used to walking home alone, and it would in any case, she said, be a quiet night. She shook hands with the two Miss Murphys and with Father Flood and wished each of them a happy Christmas before she set out to walk through the dark, empty streets of Brooklyn. She would, she thought, go straight to her room and avoid the kitchen. She wanted to lie on the bed and go over everything that had happened before falling asleep.

In January, Eilis felt the fierce sharp cold in the mornings as she went to work. No matter how fast she walked, and even when she bought thick socks, her feet felt frozen by the time she arrived at Bartocci's. Everyone in the streets was covered up as though afraid to show themselves, wearing thick coats, scarves, hats, gloves and boots. She noticed that they even covered their mouths and noses with thick scarves or mufflers as they moved along. All she could see was their eyes, and the expression seemed alarmed by the cold, made desperate by the wind and the freezing temperatures. At the end of the lectures in the evening, the students huddled in the hallway of the college, putting on layer after layer of clothes as a defence against the cold night. It was, she thought, like a preparation for a strange play, with all of them trying on costumes, their gestures slow and deliberate, looks of blank determination on their faces. It appeared impossible to imagine a time when it was not cold and she could walk these streets thinking about something other than the warm hallway of Mrs. Kehoe's house, the warm kitchen and her own warm bedroom.

One evening, as she was about to go upstairs to bed, Eilis saw Mrs. Kehoe standing in the doorway of her own sitting room, hovering there in the shadows as though afraid to be seen. She beckoned to Eilis without speaking, motioned her into the room and then quietly closed the door. Even as she crossed the room and sat in the armchair by the fire, indicating to Eilis that she should sit in the armchair opposite, she said nothing. The look on her face was grave as she put her right hand out and lowered it, suggesting to Eilis that if she were to speak her voice should not be loud.

"Now," she said and looked into the fire, which was burning brightly in the grate, before placing a log and then another on the flames. "Not a word that you ever even came in here? Promise?"

Eilis nodded.

"The truth is that Miss Keegan is departing and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. I have her sworn not to say a word to anyone. She's very West of Ireland and they're better at saying nothing than we are. So it suits her because she doesn't have to say any farewells. She'll be gone on Monday and I want you to move into her room in the basement. It's not damp now so don't look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you," Eilis said.

"Well, don't."

Mrs. Kehoe studied the fire for a moment and then the floor.

"It's the best room in the house, the biggest, the warmest, the quietest and the best-appointed. And I don't want any discussion about it. You are getting it and that's that. So if you pack your things on Sunday, on Monday when you're at work I'll have them moved down, and that'll be the end of it. You'll need a key for down below because you have your own entrance, which you share with Miss Montini, but of course even if you lose the key, there's still the stairs between the basement and this floor so don't look so worried."

"Will the others not mind that I'm getting the room?" Eilis asked.

"They will," Mrs. Kehoe said and smiled at her. She then looked into the fire, nodding her head in satisfaction. She raised her head and gazed bravely at Eilis. It took Eilis a moment to realize that this was a signal from Mrs. Kehoe that she should leave. She stood up quietly as Mrs. Kehoe once more stretched out her right hand to make clear that Eilis should not make a sound.

It struck Eilis, as she made her way up the stairs to her bedroom, that the basement room could, in fact, be damp and small. She had never heard anyone say before that it was the best room in the house. She wondered if all this secrecy was not merely a way of landing her there without giving her a chance to see where she was going or make any protest. She would have to wait, she realized, until she came back from her classes on Monday night.

Over the next few days she began to dread the move and resent the idea of Mrs. Kehoe moving her cases when she was out of the house and putting them into a place from which Miss Keegan emerged daily in a state that did not seem to Eilis to suggest that she had the best room in the house. She realized also that she could not appeal to Father Flood were the room dingy or dark or damp. She had used up enough of his sympathy and she knew that Mrs. Kehoe was fully aware of this.

On the Sunday, as she packed her cases and left them by the bed, finding that she had acquired more belongings than she could fit into them and having to go downstairs and quietly ask Mrs. Kehoe for some carrier bags, she felt that Mrs. Kehoe had taken advantage of her, and she found herself suffering the beginnings of the terrible homesickness she had gone through before. That night, she did not sleep.

In the morning there was a biting wind that was new to her. It seemed to blow fiercely in every direction; it carried ice with it and people moved in the streets with their heads bowed, some of them dancing up and down with the cold as they waited to cross the street. It made her almost smile at the idea that no one in Ireland knew that America was the coldest place on earth and its people on a cold morning like this the most deeply miserable. They would not believe it if she put it in a letter. All day in Bartocci's people roared at anyone who left the door open for a second longer than necessary and there was a brisk trade in heavy woollen underwear, even more than usual.

That evening as she took notes during the lectures Eilis was struggling so hard to stay awake that she put no thought into what she would find when she returned to Mrs. Kehoe's and, when walking home from the trolley-car, decided she did not care what her new room was like as long as it was warm and had a bed where she could sleep. The night was still, the wind having died down, and there was a dryness and a punishing intensity in how the icy air bit into her toes and fingers and hurt the skin on her face and made her pray that this journey by foot would end even when she knew that she was only halfway there.