Someone (8 page)

She asked me if I would like to come along with them to the hospital. I couldn’t go upstairs to see my father settle in, you had to be over sixteen to enter the wards, but I could go as far as the lobby.

I said that would be fine.

My mother said, looking into her hands. “In sickness and in health.” Then she raised her eyes to me, cautiously, it seemed. “That’s something you must repeat when you are married. When you make your marriage vows.”

I said, “I know.”

She raised her chin and even smiled a little, with the kind of subtle admiration she usually turned on Gabe. “Do you now?” she asked me. A kind of mirth entered her eyes. “What else do you know?”

I recited the entire phrase: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” Until I saw my mother impressed by my knowledge, it never had occurred to me to wonder how I knew the words, from school, from the movies, from my friends. When she asked me, I said, “From my friends.”

My mother bent her head again and said, “Your friends talk to you about marriage, then. About what goes on.” I believe she was blushing.

I turned away from her to pick up my brush from the dresser. I began to brush my hair, still damp from my bath. I could see her reflection in my dressing mirror, sitting straight-backed on the edge of my bed, her hands in her lap. “Oh sure,” I said casually.

“Then you know,” my mother said, “about what goes on.” And in the mirror I saw I still carried the flush from the hot water in the tub. “Oh sure,” I said, not certain even then what I was admitting to.

From behind me, I heard her sigh. “You’re growing up.” She said it much as she had said it that afternoon, both amused and melancholy, and not a little impatient. I heard the familiar squeak of the bedsprings as she stood. “It’s good that you know these things.” Her voice, like the sound of the springs, seemed to move upward into the room, as if relieved of some weight. “We’ll go downtown after Mass tomorrow,” she said. “Get to bed now.”

In the morning, after church, the three of us took the trolley to the hospital. My father carried a small black satchel. In the lobby, he put his hand to the top of my head and said, “Be a good girl now”—rolling his tongue the way he did, tasting the sweetness of the joke. He leaned down, and I kissed his cheek, which was smooth-shaven and smelled cleanly of bay rum. And then I nearly knocked his hat off his head as I threw my arms around his neck. He patted my back, and then placed his two hands on my shoulders as he used to do outside the speakeasy, as if to keep me there, unmoving, while he went upstairs with my mother to get settled in.

When she came down again, the two of us walked outside and crossed the street, and then looked up at the big building. She pointed. It took me some time to find the right window. And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky’s reflection.

In the sunshine on the sidewalk in front of Mary Star of the Sea, a Sunday morning in early June when I was seventeen, Walter Hartnett said, “What’s wrong with your eye?”

Our mothers were talking, purses over their arms and hats on their heads. The sun bright off the black glass of windshields, the tin fenders, the pocketbooks of the women in that after-Mass crowd, off the white sidewalk and the road and even the fading church bells. Bright off him, too, when I looked up at him: the dark hair and that pale face, and then the gray eyes turned translucent in the sunshine.

“Nothing wrong with it,” I said. “This one just screws up on me sometimes. When the sun’s strong.”

“Well, don’t let it,” he said. “It makes your whole face look funny.”

Back home, before the tiny mirror above the narrow bathroom sink, I saw it: the way the right eye, screwed closed, pulled at the corner of my mouth so that I looked like a tough with a
wad of chewing gum in my cheek. How my glasses, thick bottle bottoms, stayed steady on my nose despite the contortions of the face behind them.

I was reminded for a moment of Walter Hartnett as a boy, the way he had held his hands behind his back, placid and wise beside blind Bill Corrigan. I was reminded of the sagacity with which Walter would nod whenever Bill Corrigan made his impossible calls. As if only he and the blind man could see what the rest of them could not.

I opened up the offending eye. Smiled at the mirror and said, “How’s that?” Took my glasses off entirely and smoothed the skin under my eyes and said, “Is that better?” Walter Hartnett. Mister Hartnett. Brushed my hair back—dark and thick but, like the scrinching eye, with a mind of its own—and peered into the small mirror, which showed me now only a smear of face and hair and smiling teeth, made my eyes as large as I could make them, and said out loud, “Is that better, Mr. Walter Hartnett?”

When he called that afternoon—his voice a small and miraculous thing inside the big black receiver—he apologized if he had been rude. It was none of his business, he said, what I did with my eyes. Later, in reconstructing the conversation in what was to be the first night of my life when sleep escaped me entirely, I replied, “Not at all,” but in truth, I’d barely murmured a word. “I’m bossy sometimes,” he said. “I get it from where I work. They give me a lot of responsibilities. Do you want to go out for a soda?”

When my daughters began dating, I told them, “Here’s a good rule: If he looks over your head while you’re talking, get rid of him. Walter Hartnett …” But by then they would throw up their hands. “Jesus, Mom, no more Walter Hartnett stories.”

Walter Hartnett on the candy-store stool looked over my head every time a figure appeared in the cornered doorway behind me. It got so I felt I could see them, too, the other people
coming in out of the evening sun, as if I could feel their cool shadows upon my back as they stood for a moment in silhouette and Walter looked beyond me to see who it was. “Hiya,” he would say if he knew them—I might have been in mid-sentence—“How are you?” He’d shoot a finger up beside his face to signal a hello. Or just stare—this was for entering strangers—his eyes following whoever it was into the candy store, wondering, calculating, assessing as a man alone might do—a man alone and unguarded in the brazenness of his gaze. And then his gray eyes would drop to my face once more. There would be a second of utter indifference, boredom perhaps, and then a slow dawning—Oh yeah, you—a slow warming as his attention returned to me once again—Well, I’m happy to be here with you—sometimes even as much as a smile entering those dark-lashed eyes, and then they would flick up again, over my head, to greet with a raised chin, or only to observe, whoever it was whose shadow had fallen over my back. Then his eyes would return to my face, unseeing once more, and then the slow recognition would begin again.

It could only have been second nature to him, this veering attention. He couldn’t have calculated its effect. But it was, for me, by turns, devastating and thrilling, so that by the time our sodas were finished and we slipped from our stools, I was unsteady on my feet from the dizzying turns my hopes, my heart, had been taking. My pumps caught themselves, somehow, against his built-up shoe, and in the tangle as I fell into him, he slipped his warm hand under my arm. “Not very graceful,” he said. But we both were blushing.

Out on the sidewalk again, we walked without touching, although most of the other people on the street seemed to be couples, young and old, walking arm in arm. The Sunday-evening promenade. The sun was setting with that thick orange light, but the sky to the east was still a cool Sunday-morning blue. There was only the slightest irrhythm in his gait, a nearly imperceptible
hitch, not a limp. Had he turned right and walked me silently straight to my stoop, I would have followed, my head down, and said nothing more. But he turned left instead, and I went with him. He was talking about his job. That it was steady and he was lucky to have it. He named some friends who had jobs he wouldn’t wish on a dog—with the B.M.T., with the diocese, on a barge that plied the harbor. He told me to forget about lower Manhattan and head to Borough Hall when the time came to look for work. Who wanted to work in New York City? All the while his eyes following the other couples we passed, or darting to the other side of the street to see who was there.

When he stopped, I thought perhaps it was because he’d recognized someone ahead. But then he turned to me, and now, in the shadow of streetlight, his eyes reacquainted themselves with my face once again; indifference, once again, warming into deep pleasure. He pointed to the brownstone behind him.

“I’ve got to run upstairs for a minute,” he said, his voice full of a reluctance to leave me that well matched his newly recalled delight in my being there. “You want to come up or wait here?”

“This your house?” I said. And he only cocked his head to convey, Whose house do you think it is?

“I’ll come up,” I told him.

He and his mother lived on the top floor, like my mother and me. “Widows in aviaries,” he would say sometime later. He let himself in, calling, “Ma?” but there wasn’t a light on in the place, except that which came from the late dusk and the newly lit streetlight at the windows. He reached for a small lamp, pulled it on. Its amber shade and the bulb beneath it swayed a little.

“She must have gone out,” he said. “Have a seat. I won’t be a minute.”

He walked through the living room, into the adjoining dining room and then into another, the kitchen perhaps. I sat. The couch was covered in a dark blue brocade, lace doilies on the
arms and across the back. There was a painting of the Holy Family over the boarded-up fireplace. The Virgin and good St. Joseph and the boy Jesus in white at the center. A small glass holding fading lilacs on the mantelpiece. Two more heavy chairs in the same midnight-blue brocade faced me. Beside one there was a sewing basket. On the small table between them, four oval photographs. I stood up and crossed to them. A wedding portrait of his parents, the father looking much like Walter might with a big mustache, a portrait of Walter as a baby, wide-eyed and propped up from behind, and then in knickers and a white collar, a huge First Communion ribbon on his arm, and then looking exactly like himself, although more thoughtful and more serious—or maybe just struggling to hold in a laugh—in his graduation gown.

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.