Brooklyn (20 page)

Father Flood came to the door with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He ushered her into the parlour at the front of his house. As he read the letter he looked worried and even when he handed it back to her he remained serious.

“You are marvellous,” he said gravely. “That is all I have to say.”

She smiled.

“Most people who come to this house without notice need something or have a problem,” he said. “You hardly ever get pure good news.”

“I have saved some money,” Eilis said, “and will be able to pay my tuition the second year and then pay you back for last year when I get a job.”

“One of my parishioners paid,” Father Flood said. “He needed to do something for mankind so I made him pay your tuition for last year and I’ll remind him soon that he needs to cough up for this year. I told him it’s a good cause and it makes him feel noble.”

“Did you tell him it was for me?” she asked.

“No. I gave him no details.”

“Will you thank him for me?”

“Sure. How’s Tony?”

She was surprised by the question, how casual and unworried
it seemed, how freely it suggested that Tony was a regular fixture rather than a problem or an interloper.

“He’s great,” she said.

“Has he taken you to a game yet?” the priest asked.

“No, but he threatens to all the time. I asked him if Wexford were playing but he didn’t get the joke.”

“Eilis, here’s one piece of advice for you,” Father Flood said as he opened the door to see her into the hallway. “Never make jokes about the game.”

“That’s what Tony said too.”

“He’s a solid man,” Father Flood said.

As soon as she showed Tony the letter when they met the next evening he said that they would have to go to Coney Island the following Sunday to celebrate.

“Champagne?” she asked.

“Sea water,” he replied. “And then a slap-up dinner in Nathan’s afterwards.”

She bought a beach towel at Bartocci’s and a sun hat from Diana, who said that she did not want it any more. At supper, Diana and Patty produced their sunglasses for the season, which they had bought on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

“I read somewhere,” Mrs. Kehoe said, “that they could ruin your eyes.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” Diana said. “I think they’re gorgeous.”

“And I read,” Patty said, “that if you don’t have them this year on the beach people will talk about you.”

Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan fitted them on and, openly ignoring Dolores, passed them to Eilis to try.

“Well, they are very glamorous, I’ll say that,” Mrs. Kehoe said.

“I’ll sell you that pair,” Diana said to Eilis, “because I can get another pair on Sunday.”

“Can you really?” Eilis asked.

When they discovered that Eilis had bought a new swimsuit, they insisted on seeing it. Eilis, when she came upstairs with it, deliberately handed it to Dolores first to hold up in front of her.

“You’re lucky, Eilis, to have the figure for it,” Mrs. Kehoe said.

“I can’t go out in the sun at all,” Dolores said. “I get all red.”

Patty and Diana began to laugh.

On Sunday morning when Tony collected her he appeared surprised by the sunglasses.

“I’ll have to tie a rope around you,” he said. “All the guys at the beach will want to run away with you.”

The subway station was packed with people going to the beach and there were cries of horror as the first two trains went through the station without stopping. The air was stifling as everyone crushed together. When finally a train stopped it seemed that there was no space for anyone and yet everyone began to crowd into the compartments, laughing and shouting and demanding that people move over and make room for them. By the time she and Tony, who was carrying a folded beach umbrella as well as a bag, found a door, there was no room at all in the train. She was amazed when Tony, holding her hand, began to push against the crowd in the compartment to make a space for both of them before the doors closed.

“How long is it going to take?” she asked.

“An hour, maybe more, it depends on how many stops it makes. But cheer up, think of the big waves.”

The beach, when they finally arrived, was almost as packed as the train had been. She noticed that Tony had not lost his smile once during the journey, despite being deliberately squashed against a door by a man, encouraged by his wife. Now he seemed to feel, as he studied the crowd on the beach, where there was no
place for newcomers, that they had been put there for his amusement. They moved along the boardwalk, but the only solution, Eilis saw, was to take a tiny spot that was empty and see if, by their very presence there, they could expand it so they both could unpack their belongings and lie in the sun.

Diana and Patty had warned her that no one changed on the beach in Italy. Italians had carried to America with them the custom of putting their bathing suits on under their clothes before they set out, thus avoiding the Irish habit of changing on the beach, which was, Diana said, ungraceful and undignified, to say the least. Eilis did not know if they were joking so she checked with Miss Fortini, who assured her that it was true. Miss Fortini also insisted that she should lose more weight and brought in a small pink-coloured razor for her and told her that she need not return it. Despite all this preparation, Eilis was nervous about taking off her clothes and appearing in her swimsuit in front of Tony; her efforts to pretend that it was nothing made her even more embarrassed. She wondered if he would notice that she had shaved and she felt she was too white and that her thighs and her bottom were too fat.

Tony stripped down to his bathing trunks instantly and, she was glad to see, nonchalantly looked at the crowds around them as she wriggled out of her clothes. As soon as she was ready, he wanted to go into the sea. He arranged with the family beside them that their things would be looked after and they made their way past the crowds down to the water’s edge. Eilis laughed when she saw him recoiling from the cold; the water, compared to the water in the Irish Sea, seemed quite warm to her. She waded out while he struggled to follow her.

As she swam out, he stood helplessly up to his waist in the water, and when she motioned for him to follow her, shouting that he was not to be a baby, he shouted back that he could not swim. She did a gentle breaststroke in his direction and then slowly real
ized, by seeing what the couples around them were up to, what his plan was. He wanted, it seemed, the two of them to stand up to their necks in the water, holding each other as each wave crashed over them. When she embraced him, he held her so that she could not easily swim away from him. She could feel his erect penis hard against her, which made him smile even more than usual, and, when he wanted to put his hands on her bottom as he held her, she swam away from him. The thought had come into her mind of telling him who the last person to touch her bottom was. The idea of his reaction to this made her laugh so much that she did a vigorous backstroke, letting him presume, she hoped, that he was being too free under the water with his hands.

All day they moved between their place on the beach and the ocean. She put on her sun hat and he raised the umbrella to prevent sunburn and he also produced a picnic that his mother had prepared for him, including a thermos of ice-cold lemonade. In the water, the few times that she swam out on her own, she felt that the waves were stronger than at home, not so much in the way they broke but in the way they pulled out. She realized that she would have to be careful not to swim too far out of her depth in this unfamiliar sea. Tony, she saw, was afraid of the water, hated her swimming away from him. As soon as she returned to him each time, he made her put her arms around his neck and he lifted her from below so that her legs were wrapped around him. When he kissed her and then held her face back and looked at her, he seemed not to be embarrassed by his erection at all but proud of it. He was all boyish as he grinned at her; she, in turn, felt a great tenderness towards him and kissed him deeply as he held her. As the day waned, they were almost the last remaining in the water.

When Eilis complained of the heat at work they told her that it was only the beginning, but one day Miss Fortini told her that
Mr. Bartocci was about to turn on the air-conditioning and soon the place would be crowded with shoppers seeking relief from the heat. Her job, Miss Fortini said, was to make them all buy something.

Soon, Eilis looked forward to going to work, and longed, as she woke sweating in the night, for the air-conditioning in Bartocci’s. In the evening Mrs. Kehoe put chairs out in front of the house and they sat there fanning themselves even in the shade, even after dark some nights. On Eilis’s half-day Tony took a half-day too and they went to Coney Island and came back late. When she asked him if they could have a go on the huge wheel or one of the other amusements, he refused, managing each time to find an excuse why they could not. He gave her no hint that he had lost his previous girlfriend because he took her on the wheel. Eilis was fascinated by this, the easy, casual way he prevented them from going there, his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.

As the summer wore on he could talk nothing except baseball. The names he told her about—names like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Preacher Roe—were the names she also heard about at work and saw mentioned in the newspapers. Even Mrs. Kehoe spoke about these players as though she knew them. She had gone the previous year to the house of her friend Miss Scanlan to watch a game on her television, and, since she was a Dodgers supporter, as she told everyone, she intended to do so again if Miss Scanlan, who was also a Dodgers supporter, would have her.

It seemed to Eilis for a while that no one spoke of anything else except the need to defeat the Giants. Tony told her with real excitement that he had secured tickets for Ebbets Field not only for himself and Eilis but for his three brothers and it was going to be the best day of their lives because they were going to get revenge for what Bobby Thomson had done to them the previous
season. As he walked through the streets with her Tony was not alone in doing imitations of his favourite players and shouting about the hopes he had for them.

She tried to tell him about the Wexford hurling team and how they were beaten by Tipperary and how her brothers and her father used to sit glued to the old radiogram in the front room on summer Sundays even if Wexford were not playing. When he began to imitate the commentators, describing imaginary games of his own, she told him that Jack her brother had done the same.

“Hold on,” he said. “You play baseball in Ireland?”

“No, it was hurling.”

He seemed puzzled.

“So it wasn’t baseball?” His face registered disappointment, then a sort of exasperation.

One night in the parish hall when the band, which had been playing swing tunes, began to play a tune that Tony seemed to recognize, he went crazy, as did many around him. “It’s the Jackie Robinson song,” he shouted. He began to swing an imaginary baseball bat. “They’re playing ‘Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?’”

As soon as Eilis returned to her classes at Brooklyn College the baseball frenzy became worse. What surprised her was that she had noticed nothing of it the previous year although it must have been going on around her with the same intensity. Now she had returned to her routine of seeing Tony on Thursday nights after class, on Friday nights in the parish hall and on Saturday for a movie, and he talked of nothing except how this would be the perfect year for him if they could be together, Eilis and himself, and if Laurence and Maurice and Frankie could be with them too and if the Dodgers could win the World Series. To her great relief, he made no further mention of having kids who would be Dodgers supporters.

She walked with the four brothers through the crowds to Ebbets Field. They had left themselves plenty of time to stop and talk to anyone at all who had news of the players, or opinions about how the game would go, or to buy hot dogs and sodas, to linger outside, part of the crush. Slowly, the differences between the brothers became more apparent to her. While Maurice smiled and seemed easygoing, he did not speak to strangers and held himself back when the others did. Tony and Frank stayed close to each other all the time, Frank eager to know what Tony’s latest opinion was. Laurence seemed to know most about the game and could easily contradict some of Tony’s assertions. She laughed at Frank as he looked from Tony to Laurence when they argued about the merits of Ebbets Field itself, Laurence insisting it was too small and old-fashioned and would have to be moved, Tony answering that it would never be moved. Frank’s eyes darted from one brother to the other; he appeared genuinely perplexed. Maurice never got involved in the arguments but managed to move them forward in the direction of the field, warning them that they were going too slowly.

When they found their seats, they put Eilis in the middle with Tony and Maurice on either side of her, Laurence on Tony’s left and Frank to the right of Maurice.

“Mom told us we weren’t to leave you at the edge,” Frank said to her.

Both Tony and her fellow lodgers had explained the rules of the game to Eilis and made it seem like rounders, which she had played at home with her brothers and their friends; still she did not know what to expect because rounders, she thought, was fine in its way but it had never provoked the same excitement as hurling or football. At Mrs. Kehoe’s the night before Miss McAdam had insisted that it was the best game in the world but
all of the others thought that it was too slow, with too many breaks. Diana and Patty agreed that the best part was going off to get hot dogs and sodas and beers and finding that nothing important had happened while you were away, despite all the shouting and cheering.

“It was stolen from us the last time, that’s all I have to say,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “It was a very bitter moment.”

Now, with half an hour to go before the game, everyone around them was behaving as though it was just about to begin. Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all. Normally, he was attentive, smiling at her, asking her questions, listening to her, telling her stories. Now, in the heat of this excitement, he could no longer manage the role of caring, thoughtful boyfriend. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard. He could not stay quiet, standing up and sitting back down and craning his neck to see what was going on behind. All the while Maurice, who had bought a programme, perused it and regularly offered Eilis and his three brothers nuggets of information that he had gleaned. He seemed worried.