Brooklyn (25 page)

“Marry me before you go back.”

“You don’t trust me to come back.”

“I read the letter your brother wrote. I know how hard it would be for you to go home and then leave again. I know it would be hard for me. I know what a good person you are. I would live in fear of getting a letter from you explaining that your mother could not be left alone.”

“I promise you I will come back.”

Each time he said “marry me” he looked away from her, mumbling the words as though he were talking to himself. Now he turned and looked at her clearly.

“I don’t mean in a church and I don’t mean we live together as man and wife and we don’t have to tell anybody. It can be just between the two of us and we can get married in a church when we decide after you come back.”

“Can you get married just like that?” she asked.

“Sure you can. You have to give them notice and I’ll get a list of things we need to do.”

“Why do you want me to do it?”

“It will just be something between us.”

“But why do you want it?”

When he spoke now he had tears in his eyes. “Because if we don’t do it, I’m going to go crazy.”

“And we’ll tell no one?”

“No one. We’ll take a half-day off work, that’s all.”

“And will I wear a ring?”

“You can if you want, but if you don’t that’s fine. All this could, if you wanted, be just something private between the two of us.”

“Would a promise not be the same?”

“If you can promise, then you can easily do this,” he said.

He arranged a date soon after her exams and they set about making all the preparations and filling out the forms that were required. The Sunday before the date she went as usual to his family for lunch. As she sat down she felt that Tony had told his mother, or that his mother had guessed something. There was a new tablecloth on the table, and the way his mother was dressed suggested an important occasion. Then when Tony’s father came in with his three brothers she saw that they were all wearing jackets and ties, which they did not normally do. Once they sat down to eat, she noticed that Frank was unusually quiet at the beginning and then every time he tried to speak the others interrupted him before he could start.

Several times more, in the course of the meal, when he opened his mouth to say something he was stopped.

Eventually, Eilis insisted that she needed to hear what he had to say.

“When we’re all in Long Island,” he said, “and when you have your house there, will you make them build me a room so I can come and stay with you when they’re all making me miserable?”

Tony, Eilis saw, had his head down.

“Of course, Frank. And you will be able to come any time you like.”

“That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Grow up, Frank,” Tony said.

“Grow up, Frank,” Laurence repeated.

“Yeah, Frank,” Maurice added.

“See?” Frank motioned to Eilis and pointed at his three brothers. “That is what I have to tolerate.”

“Don’t worry,” Eilis said. “I’ll deal with them.”

At the end of the meal, as the dessert was served, Tony’s father produced special glasses and opened a bottle of Prosecco. He
proposed that they drink for a safe journey and a safe return for Eilis. She wondered if it was still possible that Tony had told them nothing about the wedding, just about her plans to go home for a month; it struck her as unlikely that he would have let Frank know, unless Frank had overheard. Maybe they were just having a special lunch because she was going home, she thought.

In the good cheer that followed the dessert she almost began to hope that he had told them that he and she were getting married.

He arranged the ceremony for two o’clock in the afternoon a week before she was to leave. The exams had gone well and she was almost certain that she would qualify. Because other couples to be married came with family and friends, their ceremony seemed brisk and over quickly and caused much curiosity among those waiting because they had come alone.

On their journey to Coney Island on the train that afternoon Tony raised the question for the first time of when they might marry in church and live together.

“I have money saved,” he said, “so we could get an apartment and then move to the house when it’s ready.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I wish we were going home together now.”

He touched her hand.

“So do I,” he said. “And the ring looks great on your finger.”

She looked down at the ring.

“I’d better remember to take it off before Mrs. Kehoe sees it.”

The ocean was rough and grey and the wind blew white billowing clouds quickly across the sky. They moved slowly along the boardwalk and down the pier, where they stood watching the fishermen. As they walked back and sat eating hot dogs at Nathan’s, Eilis spotted someone at the next table checking out her wedding ring. She smiled to herself.

“Will we ever tell our children that we did this?” she asked.

“When we are old maybe and have run out of other stories,” Tony said. “Or maybe we’ll save it up for some anniversary.”

“I wonder what they’ll think of it.”

“The movie I’m taking you to is called
The Belle of New York.
They’ll believe that bit. But the idea that, when the movie was over, we took the subway home and I dropped you off at Mrs. Kehoe’s. They won’t believe that.”

When they finished eating, they walked together towards the subway and waited for the train to take them into the city.

H
er mother showed Eilis Rose’s bedroom, which was filled with light from the morning sun. She had left everything, she said, exactly as it was, including all of Rose’s clothes in the wardrobe and in the chest of drawers.

“I had the windows cleaned and the curtains washed and I dusted the room myself and swept it out, but other than that it’s exactly the same,” her mother said.

The house itself did not seem strange; Eilis noted only its solid, familiar aura, the lingering smell of cooked food, the shadows, the sense of her mother’s vivid presence. But nothing had prepared her for the quietness of Rose’s bedroom and she felt almost nothing as she stood looking at it. She wondered if her mother wanted her to cry now, or had left the room as it was so she could feel even more deeply Rose’s death. She did not know what to say.

“And some day now,” her mother said, “we can go through the clothes. Rose had just bought a new winter coat and we’ll see if it suits you. She had lovely things.”

Eilis suddenly felt immensely tired and thought that she should go to bed once they had eaten breakfast but she knew that her mother had been planning this moment when they would both stand in this doorway together and contemplate the room.

“You know, I sometimes think she’s still alive,” her mother said. “If I hear the slightest sound upstairs, I often think it must be Rose.”

As they ate breakfast Eilis wished she could think of something more to say but it was hard to speak since her mother seemed to have prepared in advance every word that she said.

“I have arranged a wreath to be made specially for you to leave on her grave and we can go out in a few days if the weather keeps up and then we can let them know it’s time to put Rose’s name and her dates below your father’s.”

Eilis wondered for a moment what might happen were she to interrupt her mother and say: “I am married.” She thought her mother would have a way of not hearing her, or of pretending that she had not spoken. Or else, she imagined, the glass in the window might break.

By the time she managed to say that she was tired and would need to lie down for a while, her mother had not asked her one question about her time in America, or even her trip home. Just as her mother seemed to have prepared things to say and show to her, Eilis had been planning how this first day would go. She had planned to give an account of how much more smooth the crossing from New York to Cobh had been than her first voyage from Liverpool, and how much she had enjoyed sitting up on deck taking in the sun. She had planned also to show her mother the letter from Brooklyn College telling her that she had passed her exams and would, in time, be sent a certificate to say that she was a qualified bookkeeper. She had also bought her mother a cardigan and scarf and some stockings, but her mother had almost absent-mindedly left them aside, saying that she would open them later.

Eilis loved closing the door of her old room and drawing the curtains. All she wanted to do was sleep, even though she had slept well in the hotel in Rosslare Harbour the night before. She had sent Tony a postcard from Cobh saying that she had arrived safely, and had written him a letter from Rosslare describing the journey. She was glad she did not have to write now from her bedroom, which seemed empty of life, which almost frightened her in how
little it meant to her. She had put no thought into what it would be like to come home because she had expected that it would be easy; she had longed so much for the familiarity of these rooms that she had presumed she would be happy and relieved to step back into them, but, instead, on this first morning, all she could do was count the days before she went back. This made her feel strange and guilty; she curled up in the bed and closed her eyes in the hope that she might sleep.

Her mother woke her saying it was almost teatime. She had slept, she guessed, for almost six hours and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. Her mother told her that there was hot water in case she wanted a bath. She opened her suitcases and began to hang clothes in the wardrobe and store other things in the chest of drawers. She found a summer dress that did not seem to be too wrinkled and a cardigan and clean underwear and a pair of flat shoes.

When she came back into the kitchen, having had her bath and put on the fresh clothes, her mother looked her up and down in vague disapproval. It struck Eilis that maybe the colours she was wearing were too bright, but she did not have any darker colours.

“Now the whole town has been asking for you,” her mother said. “God, even Nelly Kelly was asking for you. I saw her standing at the door of the shop and she let a big roar at me. And all your friends want you to call round, but I told them that it would be better to wait until you are settled.”

Eilis wondered if her mother had always had this way of speaking that seemed to welcome no reply, and suddenly realized that she had seldom been alone with her before, she had always had Rose to stand between her and her mother, Rose who would have plenty to say to both of them, questions to ask, comments to make and opinions to offer. It must be hard for her mother too, she thought, and it would be best to wait a few days and see if her
mother might become interested in her life in America, enough for her slowly to introduce the subject of Tony, enough for her to tell her mother that she was going to marry him when she went back.

They sat at the dining-room table going through all the letters of condolence and mass cards they had received in the weeks after Rose died. Eilis’s mother had had a memorial card printed with a photograph of Rose at her most glamorous and happy, giving her name and her age and the date of her death, with short prayers below and on the other side of the card. These had to be sent out. But also, to those who had written letters or those who had visited the house, special notes or longer letters had to be included. Eilis’s mother had divided the memorial cards into three piles: one that needed just a name and address on the envelope and a card enclosed, the second requiring a note or a letter from her, and the last needing Eilis to write a note or a letter. Eilis remembered vaguely that this had happened too after her father died, but Rose, she recalled, had taken care of everything and she had not been actively involved.

Her mother knew some of the letters of condolence she had received almost by heart and had also a list of everyone who had called to the house, which she went through slowly for Eilis, remarking on some who had come too often or stayed too long, or others who had gossiped too much or given offence by something they had said. And there were cousins of her mother from out beyond Bree who had brought neighbours of theirs, rough people from out the country, to the house, and she hoped never to lay eyes on either the cousins or their neighbours again.

Then, she said, Dora Devereux from Cush Gap and her sister Statia had come one night and they had never stopped talking, the two of them, with news about people no one else in the room had ever heard of. They had left a mass card each, her mother said, and she would write them a short note thanking them for their
visit but trying not to encourage them to call again in a hurry. But Nora Webster had come, she said, with Michael who had taught the boys in school, and they were the nicest people in the whole town. She wouldn’t mind, she said, if they came again, but as they had young children she didn’t think they would.

As her mother read out lists of other people, Eilis was almost inclined to giggle at names she had not heard of, or thought of, during her time in America. When her mother mentioned an old woman who lived down near the Folly, Eilis could not resist speaking. “God, is she still going?”

Her mother looked sorrowful and put on her glasses again as she began to search for a letter she had mislaid from the captain of the golf club saying what a treasured lady-member Rose had been and how much she would be missed. When she found it, she looked at Eilis severely.

Every letter or note Eilis wrote had to be inspected by her mother, who often wanted it done again or a paragraph added at the end. And in her own letters, as in Eilis’s, she wanted it emphasized that, since Eilis was home, she had plenty of company and needed no more visitors.

Eilis marvelled at the different ways each person had expressed condolences once they had gone beyond the first one or two sentences. Her mother tried too, in how she replied, to vary the tone and the content, to write something suitable in response to each person. But it was slow and by the end of the first day Eilis had still not gone out into the street or had any time alone. And less than half the work was done.

The following day she worked hard, saying to her mother a number of times that if they continued talking or going over each letter received they would never complete the task in front of them. Yet not only did her mother work slowly, insisting that she and not Eilis would have to write most of the letters, but wanting Eilis to look at each one she completed, but also she could not
resist making regular comments on those who had written, including people Eilis had never met.

Eilis tried to change the subject a few times, wondering to her mother if they might go to Dublin together some day, or even go to Wexford on the train some afternoon. But her mother said that they would wait and see, the thing was to get these letters written and sent and then they would go through Rose’s room and sort out her clothes.

As they had their tea on the second day, Eilis told her mother that if she did not contact some of her friends soon, they would be insulted. Now that she had begun, she was determined to win a free day, not to have to go straight from writing letters and addressing envelopes under her mother’s sharp and increasingly cranky supervision to sorting out Rose’s clothes.

“I arranged for the wreath to be delivered tomorrow,” her mother said, “so that’s our day for the graveyard.”

“Yes, well, I’ll see Annette and Nancy tomorrow evening, then,” Eilis said.

“You know, they called around asking when you were coming back. I put them off, but if you want to see them, then you should invite them here.”

“Maybe I’ll do that now,” Eilis said. “If I leave a note for Nancy, then she can get in touch with Annette. Is Nancy still going out with George? She said they were getting engaged.”

“I’ll let her give you all the news,” her mother said, and smiled.

“George would be a great catch,” Eilis said. “And he’s good-looking as well.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” her mother said. “They could make a slave out of her in that shop. And that old Mrs. Sheridan is very noble. I wouldn’t have any time for her at all.”

Walking out into the street brought Eilis instant relief, and, as it was a beautiful warm evening, she could happily have walked for miles. She noticed a woman studying her dress and her stock
ings and her shoes and then her tanned skin, and she realized with amusement as she moved towards Nancy’s house that she must look glamorous in these streets. She touched her finger where the wedding ring had been and promised herself that she would write to Tony that evening when her mother had gone to bed and work out a way of posting her letter in the morning without her mother knowing. Or maybe, she thought, it would be a good way of letting her mother gently into the secret, in case she had not seen the letters that Eilis had written to Rose, that there was someone special for her in America.

The next day, as they walked out to the graveyard with the wreath, anyone they met whom they knew stopped to talk. They complimented Eilis on how well she looked but did not do so too effusively or in too frivolous a tone because they could see that she was on her way with her mother to her sister’s grave.

It was only as they walked up through the main avenue of the graveyard towards the family plot that Eilis understood fully the extent to which she had been dreading this. She felt sorry for how much she had been irritated by her mother over the previous days and now walked slowly, linking her arm while carrying the wreath. A few people in the graveyard stood and watched as they approached the grave.

There was another wreath almost withered that her mother removed, and then she stood back beside Eilis, facing the headstone.

“So, Rose,” her mother said quietly, “here’s Eilis, she’s home now and we’ve brought fresh flowers out to you.”

Eilis did not know if her mother expected her to say something too, but, since she was crying now, she was not sure she could make herself clear. She held her mother’s hand.

“I’m praying for you, Rose, and thinking about you,” Eilis whispered, “and I hope you’re praying for me.”

“She’s praying for all of us,” her mother said. “Rose is up in heaven praying for all of us.”

As they stood there silently at the grave, Eilis found the idea that Rose was below the earth surrounded by darkness almost impossible to bear. She tried to think about her sister when she was alive, the light in her eyes, her voice, her way of putting a cardigan over her shoulders if she felt a draught, her way of handling their mother, making her interested in even the smallest detail of Rose’s and Eilis’s lives, as though she too had the same friends, the same interests, the same experiences. Eilis concentrated on Rose’s spirit and tried to keep her mind from dwelling on what was happening to Rose’s body just beneath them in the damp clay.

They walked home by Summerhill and then past the Fair Green to the Back Road because her mother said that she did not want to meet anybody else that day, but it occurred to Eilis that she did not want anyone to see Eilis who might invite her out or cause her to leave her mother’s side at any point.

That evening, when Nancy and Annette called Eilis noticed Nancy’s engagement ring immediately. Nancy explained that she had been engaged to George for two months now, but she hadn’t wanted to write to Eilis about it because of Rose.

“But it’s great you’ll be here for the wedding. Your mother is delighted.”

“When is the wedding?”

“On Saturday, the twenty-seventh of June.”

“But I’ll be gone back,” Eilis said.

“Your mother said you’ll still be here. She wrote and accepted the invitation on behalf of the two of you.”