Someone (20 page)

My mother put her hands to the table and slowly rose. Tom stood, moved to help her with her chair. She touched him gently on the arm, although she was never one to go about touching strangers. “I’ll leave it to you, Tom,” she said, “to stand between these two. I’m going back to bed.”

So I had my wedding in the pretty church, after all.

Squinting at myself in the narrow bathroom mirror, lovely in my makeup and my veil, I confess to recalling another time: How’s that, Mr. Hartnett, I thought, making eyes at my own reflection. Mr. Walter Hartnett.

Gabe walked me down the aisle and surprised me at the last minute by not merely kissing my cheek when we reached Tom but pulling me into a firm embrace. We all joked about it later, at the reception. “Like he was sending you off to the Foreign Legion,” Tom said. Gabe laughed quietly. Admitted, blushing, that he might have been a little overcome, there was so much to think about on such a day. “I am the fool of loss,” he said.

“You haven’t lost a sister,” Tom told him. “You’ve gained me. God help you.”

That night, Tom lifted the blanket and I closed my eyes completely, even though the light in the hotel room was already dim, only a thin shaft from along the bathroom door and the low
glow of streetlight behind the thick curtains. “There’s not much to you, is there?” he said.

I was on my back, my hands folded together over my chest so that I was aware of both the new wedding ring on one and the feel of my own heartbeat beneath the other. I wore the white nightgown, satin and lace, that my mother had sewn. It was the centerpiece of my trousseau, and the provocative way my mother had worked the lovely lace into its bodice had come as some surprise to me. My mother, it seemed, knew things she had never spoken of.

“Take it or leave it,” I told Tom with a laugh. I was dizzy with the champagne we had drunk.

And Tom said, “Oh, I’ll take it. If I may.”

There was the stirring touch of alcohol on his breath. The taste of champagne and sweet cake at the back of my throat. The faint, lingering scent of bleach on the hotel’s sheets and pillowcases. And it was either an indication of some expertise I didn’t know he had, or of my mother’s skill with fabric and needle and thread, that I was out of the lovely gown without the slightest effort on my part, without even opening my eyes.

I was naïve enough, drunk enough, to be surprised to find that a body could become a new thing altogether, shed of its clothes. Just as I was surprised to discover, not then, of course, but over time, that in the dark it would all remain unchanged—skin, hair, and limb, bone and blubber, scent and heartbeat and rhythm of breath. Unchanged as far as mouth was concerned, lips were concerned. A mystery revealed only to the long married.

In the morning, in the pale hotel room, what a lot of strangeness. I reached for my glasses to see the time. Just after 7:00 a.m. There was a brown-edged cigarette burn in the wood of the nightstand that I associated somehow with the narrow headache that was searing the center of my brain. My mouth was as dry as ash.
Experience told me I would not go back to sleep. Whatever charm the room had had last night, with its low light and drawn shades and elegant silver bucket of champagne, hadn’t exactly fled—I had never before, after all, spent a night in a place anything like the St. George Hotel—but there was a weirdness about it all at this hour of the morning—the light behind the pale green curtains and the rattling of the dark radiator, a door slamming somewhere, the revving of motors in the street, a disappointing sense of an ordinary day, even here in the lovely hotel, an ordinary day simply going on. Tom, this stranger, with his thin hair curled like a Coney Island Kewpie doll’s above his pink face, was serenely asleep beside me.

I found my nightgown on the floor, slipped into it—hardly a wrinkle, I was happy to discover, good fabric, as my mother had said. The robe was on a chair in the corner. In the bathroom, I threw cold water on my face to relieve the headache. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, combed my hair, and put on a little lipstick. In the movies, there would be room service, a bellhop pushing a cloth-draped table into the room, ostrich feathers on my sleeves, but it was Sunday morning and we had to fast, since we were meeting my mother and Gabe for ten o’clock Mass. My mother would give us breakfast back home, with all the wedding party invited. There would be some quiet kidding, no doubt, Tom’s friends from the brewery especially. At the reception one of them had crooned, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed, we danced and we danced cause the room had no bed.” One had left a jar of Vaseline on the seat of the hired car when we left the reception—which Tom knocked to the floor and I pretended I didn’t see.

We were taking a train to a resort outside of Albany, a place Gerty had recommended that would prove to be less elegant than we had hoped.

With my head aching, I recalled something my father had once said, about someone not being the first groom to feel under the weather the morning after the big day. I figured I wasn’t the first bride to feel this way, either. And then I remembered it was Dora Ryan’s husband he had referred to. The woman pretending to be a man. I was grateful that I hadn’t thought of her before this, especially last night, as we slipped out of our clothes.

When I went back to the room, Tom was awake and looking at me with some concern. His hair still stood up above his bald scalp like a pale flame. “Are you all right?” he whispered as if I were some delicate thing, and although I was a little sore—I’ll admit I had wondered at one point if the Vaseline would have helped—I said, blasé, “Oh, I’m fine, thank you. And yourself?”

He said he suspected a glass of tomato juice with a shot of Worcestershire would help, after Mass. And I quoted my father to him, Not the first groom, after the big night.

He moved aside a bit, as if he needed to make room for me to get back into bed, and I climbed in beside him.

Strangely—here I was in my satin and lace nightgown and him in his undershirt, in bed together for the first time in our lives and talking as if we were fully clothed and sitting at my mother’s table drinking tea—we went over our plans for the day, Mass, breakfast, the subway to Grand Central, or should we splurge and take a cab? Why not? Our packed suitcases were at my mother’s—I said “my mother’s” purposefully, self-consciously, not “my house,” or even “home,” as if to remind myself of where I now belonged—even if it was only a small apartment in Rego Park that I had barely seen, that Tom had secured only two weeks earlier. I said “the old neighborhood,” although it had been my neighborhood just the day before.

Because she was on my mind, or perhaps because we were a married couple now and such subjects were no longer impolite, I
told him the story of Dora Ryan’s travail, back in the old neighborhood: a woman pretending to be a man.

“More to be pitied,” Tom said. He in turn told me about a fellow he worked with, Darcy Furlong, from the South. “A nice guy,” he said, “but a window dresser, if you know what I mean.” Some of the other fellows had given him a hard time until the boss put a stop to it—the guy’s tormented enough, was the way the boss, Mr. Heep, had put it to Tom.

(At our reception, Mr. Fagin and Mr. Heep had stood before me, arm in arm, laughing and pointing at each other, shouting about what they called the “irony of it,” that they both had names out of Charles Dickens. I thought it only a meaningless happenstance, but Tom, who had learned his catechism from former chorus girls, saw every such coincidence as God’s winking reminder that He was a regular Ziegfeld, orchestrating everything. Tom raised his glass to the two men and said, “Beers and biers,” which got everybody roaring.)

“You’ve got to have some pity for them,” Tom said. “People like that. It’s got to be a lonely life.”

And we drew closer together, in our new and unaccustomed intimacy, under the hotel sheets that smelled faintly of bleach and now of our own sleep-warmed bodies.

For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain—this is how we saw the world—there would never again be loneliness in life. For Tom, as it turned out.

He shifted in the bed and put his arm around my waist, put his face to the satin and lace of my lap. There was the sound of water running in another room, another door closing somewhere nearby, and short voices in the hall. The ordinary, rushing world going on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.

I reminded him that we didn’t have much time, we had to
get going if we were going to make it to Mass. His cheek against my bare arm was rough with the night’s stubble. The taste of champagne lingered on his breath. To hell with time, he said, and I marveled to discover that this was something we might also do in daylight.

The figure in the doorway was squarely built, broad-shouldered in his long white T-shirt and with a wide dark head, but not tall, and decidedly pitched to the right.

“Can’t you sleep, Marie?” he said.

“No,” I told him.

“Would you like some hot milk?” A smiling lilt to the words.

“No,” I said, resisting the charm of it.

I heard him sigh. Saw him tilt a little farther to his right, leaning, I supposed, against the door frame.

“Is there anything at all I can do for you?” he said. There was some golden light, hallway light, behind him. There was the lamplight from behind my chair that touched his white T-shirt. He had told me at some point that he’d found a cardboard box of them, size XXL, on the side of the Grand Central Parkway, and now he wore them every day to work, fresh and clean, a little too long, perhaps. He was not a tall man, but broad and strong, although somewhat misshapen. He had had scoliosis
as a child. He had told me this, too. Like most of the workers here, caregivers they called themselves, he was from one of the Islands and spoke with a lilt that was often both beautiful and incomprehensible.

“I’m fine,” I said.

If you’re the caregiver, I sometimes said, am I the caretaker? But they didn’t understand the joke.

“Would you like to get back into bed?” he asked, and I lifted my hand. Sleep eluded me in the way so many things had begun to do: recollections, sounds, vision. I had grown weary of waiting for it. “No,” I said, “I’m better off in the chair.”

“I think you would be better off in the bed,” he said.

And I told him I had four children, six grandchildren, and each one of them did an excellent imitation of my mother. He should try another tactic.

I heard him laugh. He said, “But your mother couldn’t teach you to bake the bread.”

I said, “That’s true.” It surprised me to recall that I had told him the story. “I thought if I learned to cook, my mother would die. The way it happened to my friend. I was a stubborn child,” I added. “ ‘A bold piece’ is what my mother called me.”

With the way my eyes were, and the way the hallway light shone behind him, it was impossible to see his face, but I heard his laughter, which was meant to tell me I hadn’t changed. Two small children, who were not real, stood beside him, leaning against the hem of his oversized shirt. It was a trick my eyes had begun to play on me: figures appearing here and there, mostly in my peripheral vision: strangers, children in old-fashioned clothes, sometimes nuns in long habits or women with babies in their arms. A clean and lacy light all about them.

When I told my own children about this, they either nodded impatiently—well, if you’d had that transplant—or commiserated with false enthusiasm: maybe it means you’re regaining
some vision. Even with my diminished eyesight, I knew they were exchanging “Let’s be tolerant” looks. Once, I asked them, impatiently—an impatient patient—“Why do you think every mystery is just a trick of the light?”

But my caregiver here in the doorway, in his oversized T-shirt, found in a cardboard box on an access road off the Grand Central Parkway—I knew all his stories just as he knew mine—called these illusions angels, the consoling angels that appeared to only the few, in their old age. He said I saw them because I had once saved someone’s life. Some Island superstition, I thought, or a tactic from the caregivers’ manual. But closer to what I wanted to believe, to tell the truth.

Still, I told him he was very much mistaken. I said I’d worked at Fagin’s funeral parlor until my first child came along. I was the consoling angel in those days, I said. I helped bury the dead. I didn’t save a one of them.

Now he asked me, his hands held to his sides as if to place them on the illusory children’s heads, “Will you call me when you’re ready to get into the bed? Will you do that at least, so I can help you?”

I said, “I will,” and the silence that followed told me he knew I lied. I saw the children move into the room.

“If you ask,” he said softly, “you know I will do it for you. You only have to ask.” And then he disappeared from what was left of my vision, because my eyes suddenly brimmed with foolish tears.

I suppose I stood then, because he caught me as I fell.

The doctor was red-faced. His hands were abrupt. “Mrs. Commeford,” he said, “you are not cooperating.”

Although I could not see it, I knew there must have been perspiration beaded on his forehead, because as he leaned to shout at me, a drop of it hit the sheet beneath my chin. I didn’t see it fall, but somehow I heard the sound it made, and in my pain I imagined that out of that sound, the sound of a raindrop on a dry roof, there rose more profoundly the scent of the hospital laundry, the scent of bleach on the sheet that nearly reminded me, too, of some experience in this life that I might have liked, might have loved, even—my first night with Tom, under sheets that had not been dried in the sun or on a line in my mother’s kitchen—but the pain was a swelling black tide that engulfed the brief, bright recollection in the same way it began to absorb the doctor’s red face and the hovering nurses in white and the light in the room—daylight or electric, who could say. I had been in labor for hours and hours by then, days perhaps.

I had not understood, I had not been told, the extent of the suffering involved, from the cramps of the enema to the scrape of the razor to the endless searing rise and the long aching fall of each contraction.