Someone (26 page)

Matt Cain pulled in his great big legs and leaned to the coffee table to put out his cigarette. “None for me, thanks,” he said. He placed his hands on his thighs and turned to my brother. “I should go,” he said. There seemed to be a thousand meanings conveyed in it. Gabe said, “I’ll walk you out.”

Matt Cain insisted on carrying his and Gabe’s beer glasses to
the kitchen. He shook hands with me there, and with Tom and the two girls. I knew the smell of whatever he used on his hair would linger. As he started back through the dining room to the front door, Gabe caught his shoulder. He indicated the door to the carport. “Susan tells me this is the preferred means of egress and ingress,” Gabe said, and winked at me.

“I’ll put on the light,” I said.

Through the curtained glass in the door, I could see the two men pause. Gabe pointed to the ceiling of the carport and Matt Cain playfully bounced the hanging tennis balls off the windshield of Tom’s car. I heard them laugh, and I hoped in my heart there was no mockery in it. Not of Tom, I thought, who had lost a day of work to drive all the way out to Suffolk to fetch him. Who had driven out there a dozen times this year to sit in the men’s ward with him so he would not be alone. I watched them move away from the car, around the corner of the house to the driveway.

I finished up in the kitchen, and when Gabe hadn’t yet come in, I left a note on the dining-room table. Gone to bed. But don’t hesitate to knock if there’s anything you need. I added, Sleep well, choosing between it and We’re so glad you’re here.

The girls were in the basement, the television was on, and I called down to tell them, Not too late. Helen said, Susan’s already asleep, and Susan said sleepily, No, I’m not. Usually I left the basement door open so I could hear them when they came up, but tonight I closed it.

I went into my room. Tom was already in bed. He was reading a folded-back news magazine, his glasses perched on his nose. On these hot summer nights he slept in his shorts and a thin white tank shirt that exposed his fleshy shoulders, as pink and round as his head. He had the window fan on high and only looked up briefly when I came in, smiled vaguely. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and put on my summer nightgown.
Then I crossed the room once more and turned the fan down to a low hum. I went through my fusty bedtime routine. Turned the clock around on my night table. Poured some hand cream into my palms and spread it up and down my arms. Placed a pale blue hairnet over the back of my head. Turned off the lamp that had been my mother’s in the old apartment and slipped off my glasses. The room contracted and lost every edge. I got into bed and, as was our routine, turned on my side to face Tom as he read. I closed my eyes. As was his routine, Tom lowered his arm to the mattress beside me, giving it to me. I put my two hands on his forearm, moved to put my lips to his skin.

I had turned the fan down low enough so that I could hear Gabe coming in and the girls coming up from the basement. Low enough, too, so that I could ask Tom what Gabe had said while I was in the kitchen, about his routine at Suffolk. Had he mentioned the electric shock? Had he talked about what had brought him there. That terrible day?

I closed my eyes and put my lips to my husband’s cool flesh, and he, still reading, brushed the back of his hand against my breast. I had not liked Gabe’s friend, and in my distaste, I had gone into the kitchen and lost out on what Gabe had said, about his routine at Suffolk. About what had brought him there. I had turned the fan down low enough so that I could now whisper, “Who was that guy, that friend of his?”

Tom flipped the magazine closed with one hand and placed it on his nightstand. He took his reading glasses off and leaned toward the light, keeping his arm on the mattress beside me, pulling away just a little to reach the cord. He sat back. It was his habit to ease himself into bed as a man might sink into a tub. He moved under the sheet just a little, keeping his back against the pillows that were piled against the headboard. Again, idly, he moved his hand against my breast.

“Do you remember Darcy Furlong?” he said into the darkness, just above the whirring of the fan. “From the brewery?”

I laughed. “That name,” I said.

I let go of his arm and rolled over on my back. He put his hand on my hip.

“Rumors went around about him for years,” he said. “Foolish things, mostly. Someone found him knitting in the lunchroom. There was supposed to be a tube of lipstick in his desk drawer. He wore polish on his toes—although some of us joked that, hell, if that was true, at least it meant that at some point he took off those damn saddle shoes.” He chuckled. “Nothing terrible, really. Just small, snide things said about him now and then. But Mr. Heep got wind of it, eventually. He always had one ear to the ground in that way. So Darcy was out sick for a while—some minor surgery, we all signed a card. And during this time Mr. Heep calls us in for a meeting. I told you about this.”

I nodded. I recalled it vaguely. “Mr. Heep said he was aware that there were certain kinds of rumors going around about Mr. Furlong and all he wanted to know was did anyone have any way to prove they were true? Anyone have proof? That’s all he asked. Of course, no one did. What in the world would serve as proof? We saw him in the office every day. He was a good worker. He came in on time in the morning and went home at night. He was a bachelor. His family lived down South. What else was there to know? And when no one answered, Mr. Heep said, ‘Well, neither do I, so until someone has proof, evidence, that what you have to say about Mr. Furlong is the absolute truth, I want the rumors to stop. I want an end to them. And I’ll fire the first man who defies me.’”

I heard the back door open and close. Heard, I was certain, Gabe pausing to lift my note from the dining-room table. I was
aware of the coolness of my words—I had not written, after all, We are so glad you’re here.

I could hear Gabe’s footsteps on the bare floor of the living room as he crossed to the staircase. Tomorrow I would tell him again that he was welcome to stay.

“That was it,” Tom was saying. “The rumors stopped. Sure, everyone was free to continue to think what he liked, but no one said a word. I have to say, I admired Mr. Heep for the way he handled it. Put a stop to it. Whatever Darcy Furlong was—fairy or window dresser or momma’s boy, or just a lonely guy who liked fancy socks and his own routine—what good was to come of all of us talking about him? What were we going to discover? What were we going to change?”

In the darkness, I felt him sink himself a bit farther into the bed, as was his routine. I felt myself, my heart, sinking as well. My brother had been the golden child reciting poetry I couldn’t understand, the thin seminarian emerging from the shadow of the tall trees, his prayer book cupped in his hands. Not a year in his first parish, he had given my father the last sacrament, even as the poor man’s suffering was at its last and terrible height. I had been startled by the ferociousness of his grief—you slept?—when I woke up in the car we had hired from Fagin. I had been at various times annoyed and puzzled by his solitude and his brooding, his vigilance, the way he feared what was ugly or unkind, and the way compassion seemed to upend him—walking out naked and weeping into the ravaged streets where we had been young. My brother was a mystery to me, but a mystery I had always associated with the sacred darkness of the bedroom we had shared in Brooklyn, or the hushed groves of the seminary, or the spice of the incense in the cavernous church, even with his lifelong, silent communion with the words he found in his books. Incomprehensible, yes, but in the same way that much that was holy was incomprehensible to me, little pagan.

And now my heart fell to think that the holy mystery of who my brother was might be made flesh, ordinary flesh, by the notion that he was simply a certain kind of man.

To think that he had walked out that summer day, crying, weeping, naked, and grieving, not for the mortal world, but for himself alone.

I felt Tom lean down in the darkness to kiss the top of my head, and in doing so, he put his hand to my arm, my elbow. “Now, I’m not saying I know anything about this guy who was here tonight,” he said. “All I’m saying is, we should let Gabe be. He’s been poked and prodded and shocked and, worse yet, talked at till he’s blue in the face, out there in that place.” The awful name now forever expelled from our conversation with his turn of phrase. “I got sick of it myself, and I was only visiting, the way they wanted to reduce everything to a couple of easy words about sex.” He paused, as if to consider. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I see things too simply.” He eased himself down, into the comfort and the darkness of our bed. “Who can know the heart of a man?” he whispered, and pulled the thin sheet up, over my shoulders and his, as was his habit before we went to sleep. “Especially a man like your brother.”

Later, Tom spoke out of the darkness. It was the middle of the night. He had gotten up for some reason—had the phone rung?—and now he was back in the room. Leaning over, his breath warm. He was whispering. Or crying. I came awake to realize he was crying. “It’s Tommy,” he was saying. Our Tommy.

Tommy’s drowned, he said. I could barely make out the words. He hadn’t put on the light. His head was heavy now against my shoulder. Drowned or driving, he was saying, drunk driving, I heard, and I heard myself say, “Oh God.” I got out of the bed, aware, in the darkness, of the heavy weight of him on the mattress. He was crying, speaking, They were bringing him home,
he told me. Through the night. Bringing the body home, and I put my hands over my ears at the phrase. I would not hear it. I found myself in the living room where the dull streetlight came through the crisscross curtains in grays and whites. I had forgotten to draw the blinds last night, with that Matt Cain character here in the living room, and now there was a nightmarish tinge to the couch and the coffee table and the lamps, the family pictures on the walls, the sound of my own entreaties, which I might have been speaking out loud, wasn’t at all speaking out loud, Make this a dream, O God, too terrible, too cruel.

But it was the very cruelty of it that made me know it was real. Brutal and cruel, the way of all flesh. But to lose a child was the worst of it all. I fell to my knees. There was the smell of dust on the bare floor. I could hear Gabe coming down the stairs, sleepy and afraid. Good Lord, what’s wrong. I had my head to my knees, and from somewhere in the darkness I could hear the girls’ careening voices, asking, asking, but putting off with their questions the answer they feared to hear. Some general devastation. Don’t put on the light, I begged my brother as he came down the stairs. Tommy is dead. My child. They are bringing his body home through the night.

Good God, good God, he said.

There was wailing from the other rooms. The body was coming home, I heard someone say, and I put my hands to my ears. It was a terrible word, used this way. How could it be that I had never heard it before, the cruelty of it, the stupidity. Why hadn’t Mr. Fagin, in all his wisdom, banned the term. The body. Stuffed with horsehair. The child warm in my arms. How would I bear it?

Gabe pressed his hands to my ears. This can’t be real, I said. Tell me it’s not real, make it not real. I had him by the sleeve. I pulled at his sleeve. I said it to Gabe, but he was full of sympathy and utter helplessness. Impossible, I heard him whisper. He was
crying. Weeping. Impossible, he said. I was alone. No one had turned on a light.

You could ask, I said. My throat ached. Ask.

I woke slowly to the darkness of the bedroom and the steady hum of the summer fan, which Tom had turned up during the night. I felt the ache in my throat that told me I had been crying in my sleep. The house was silent. Tom was snoring softly beside me. It took a few seconds for the dream’s grief to fall away, so real and terrible. I had had such dreams before. My throat still ached with how real it had been.

I wiped my wet cheek with the heel of my hand. It was the middle of a summer night and my husband was asleep beside me. It had been nothing more than a dream of disaster. Overanxious-mother dream of disaster. Fagin’s girl hearing in my dreams the long settled echo of other people’s grief. Plus dinner table talk of Tommy and Jimmy diving in and out of the salt ocean day after day, hung over and carefree.

Still, it was a terrible thing to say “the body.”

Still, I had asked and it had been given. His life restored.

Still, tonight I’d have Tom call the restaurant where both boys worked and tell them to get themselves home for dinner this week. “Your mother is worried,” Tom would say. He would know just how to put it, both joking and sincere: the women must be humored. “Come home and give your mother a chance to look at you.”

I sat up, reached for my glasses, stood. I walked out into the living room, where I saw I had indeed forgotten to close the blinds against the coming morning’s heat. The slatted streetlight was exactly as I had seen it just moments ago. I could smell the summer dust on the bare floors. And each of the family photos on the wall—professional portraits already looking dated, graduation pictures from a time already past—was stamped with the
same distorting darkness I had seen in my dream. I paused at the foot of the stairs. The walls of the room were lit with lozenges of streetlight, long rectangles and a thin cross. From the bedroom upstairs I could hear my brother breathing in his dreamless sleep. I climbed slowly. When I reached the top of the stairs, where it was darker, I slid my bare feet cautiously along the floor, some intimation of how I must walk now, in my blindness.

I looked into the boys’ room, which was dimly lit by the streetlight, the two narrow beds neat and undisturbed, the scent of boy about it still, but tempered now with the warm breeze, the odor of the day’s heat against the roof. I looked into the second room, where Gabe slept, the windows opened, a night breeze stirring. Gabe was on his back, under a white sheet, his arm thrown over his eyes as he used to do. He was awake and he whispered into the darkness, “Marie?” as I entered the room.

“Are you all right?” I asked him, and he answered, “Fine. And yourself?” Which made me smile.