As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (12 page)

“Come on, tell me something,” Tyler once said to Bec. It was evening, mid-March, close to closing time. She’d been working there eight months. Even more incredible than that was the fact that she lived on her own, three blocks away on Howe Street, in an apartment her father hadn’t wanted her to take. “I didn’t mean the work to be what you did for forever,” Maks had said back in August when he’d helped Bec move in. “What did you think? I’d just quit on him?” she responded incredulously. As she spoke, she clutched a sketchbook to her chest. In the last month she’d begun drawing, which was something like dreaming. There were dresses, dresses, and more dresses. Now she sat in a chair against the store’s back wall, hemming a dress. Tyler sat beside her, forgetful, as he often was, of the measuring tape draped around his neck. Pearl Delaney had already received her kiss and left. “Tell me just one thing about yourself,” Tyler said.

“I’m not the educated kind.” After a pause she added, “And I really couldn’t care less.”

“Well, then. That’s firm. I won’t attempt to educate you.”

She stopped sewing. She looked at Tyler briefly. He was glancing at her with an amused expression. “Anything else I shouldn’t do?” he asked.

She laughed, then nodded. “Could you finally tell me what
that
means?” She pointed to the wall above his head. Hanging there, framed, was an embroidery with the words
The Fairies Are Always Passing.
Pearl had stitched her name at the bottom. She’d stitched in the date as well,
1921.

Tyler pulled the tape measure from his neck, stood, and grabbed his coat from a nearby hook. “Come on,” he said. “Day’s done. I’ll tell you on the way out.”

What he told her, as they walked a block, and then another, was that “the fairies are always passing” was a saying of Pearl’s. It had to do with the old tale of Paddy Corcoran’s wife, Kitty, bedridden for seven years, who was finally visited by a fairy who told her that her children were throwing her dirty water out back, just when the fairies passed. A little adjustment, the fairy suggested, and with that change—dirty water out the side window, please—Kitty’s health came right back.

“It’s an Irish tale. I guess she figures if you’re aware that the fairies are always passing, you’ll be mindful of your ways,” Tyler explained. They’d come to a corner. Bec’s apartment was one way and Tyler’s home another. The March air was cool but not cold. Still, they both wore their winter coats. A street lamp cast a glow over Tyler’s face. He wasn’t smiling, but he was content, she could see, to be standing there, talking.

“Mindful of your ways? She figures
that?
”

“We may not always be who we want to be, but we can always aspire,” Tyler said, and it relieved Bec to hear in his words an understanding that Pearl was harsh.

“The fairies are always passing,” she said, her voice more agreeable than before. She looked around.

Tyler, too, began to search, and when he apparently didn’t see any fairies in the streets, he turned his face upward and Bec followed. They stared at the nearby street lamp.

“See any?” he asked.

“Maybe one or two,” she said blinking at the light.

Every Saturday night she received three long-distance phone calls, from her mother and her sisters. And once monthly her father came to get her and she’d spend a weekend back home. “You don’t have to stay here,” Maks told her each time he returned her to Howe Street. “We’ve got room for you at home. Just like always.”

Her response was to point to the windows of her two rooms. “I like it,” she said, surprising even herself. This was a year into what she referred to as “the new life.”

Two and a half years into it, and countless Irish folktales later, Tyler gave Bec more space in the back room, a worktable of her own along with a new Singer sewing machine, a splurge he insisted he could afford and was certain would pay off. He gave her time to design as well. Since her start at the shop she’d made several dresses special order, much like the one for her mother, and the women were pleased. Friends of those women then came in, asking for a dress from Bec. As the circle of clients widened—a godsend in such times, Tyler remarked—it seemed only right that Bec be given room for the design work. He bought more sketchbooks, a pile of them. The homemade dresses added something special to the inventory, he said nodding. Priced modestly, they could very well save the place, keep it afloat until the world began to spin again. She stared at the floor. The news was good but somehow embarrassing.

Pearl Delaney was incensed at the development and in the weeks following the new setup Pearl’s comments to Bec became personal. “You don’t look so good,” she told her on more than one occasion. “Old,” she explained. “Beyond your years. And that’s what happens to a working girl who never marries.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Bec once dared to ask.

Pearl cackled. “I had my Billy,” she said. “I wasn’t an old maid, just unlucky in the children category. But until Billy passed I had a man in my bed every night.” She laughed some more and turned to Bec. “That’s right. Every night.”

The remarks did their work; they hurt Bec, reminding her of the obvious: that nobody shared her bed. Perhaps because of the reminder there soon followed nights when she fell asleep dreaming of Tyler. She’d wake ashamed then tell herself that’s what a certain kind of loneliness did to a person. It made you hungry. It left you helpless, feeding off whatever was in front of you. She dreamed of Tyler, married as he was, because she knew of no one else to dream about.

She saw his wife now and again, a pretty woman, her face always made up with just the right touch of rouge, her attire something sharp from the store. She stopped by infrequently but when she did, all work ceased. They were being visited, as if by the queen. And as befitted a royal visit, everyone, even Pearl, was on the best of behavior. Though morning was Mrs. McMannus’s typical visiting time, she came to the shop once in the late afternoon, a fall day. Tyler took his wife’s arm, sat her down, brewed her tea. Bec and Pearl were asked to join them. From previous visits Bec knew that Tyler’s wife liked to talk, and it seemed to Bec that she was even starved to do so. At least she asked her usual unstoppable questions. How was business? What were they each working on now? Who would they be voting for in the upcoming election? She thought Tyler should run for something local, she said. He had the personality, the way with people, Mrs. McMannus argued. He could do more, make a name for himself. The suggestion prompted Tyler to rise from his chair. He pointed to the black letters on the store window. “Don’t you see?” he asked his wife after some silence. “I have a name,” he told her firmly. “And I like it here.”

In December of ’37—Bec was five years into the job by then—Pearl Delaney took sick. She was out a week, and then another. When she didn’t come back the third week, Tyler took to stopping by her place on his way home with some food in hand. At first he brought her sandwiches from the coffee shop across the street, and then he brought her whole bags of groceries. Toward the end of the third week Tyler asked Bec if she could help him prepare some meals for Pearl. She was bedridden by then, he explained. She couldn’t make a thing, and he wasn’t much help. They’d go together to her apartment that night, a Thursday, he suggested with some urgency, if Bec didn’t mind.

When they entered Pearl’s apartment that evening the lights were off, and Tyler left them off for a few minutes, even after he’d taken the groceries he and Bec had carried in and placed them on a counter.

“She’s asleep,” he whispered upon returning from Pearl’s bedroom.

The lights finally on, Bec began to simmer a soup stock. In a separate pot she boiled potatoes. Pearl’s kitchen was narrow and equipped with just the basics. Bec had counted the pots hanging over the stove—three—to make sure she could manage what she’d planned to make. Soup, potatoes, peas.

When they finally took the food to Pearl, Bec saw that the room adjacent to the kitchen, a sitting room—two upholstered chairs and a coffee table between them—was as tiny as the kitchen. But the bedroom beyond that finally had some space to it. A person could walk several paces between the bed and the dresser and the single chair in a corner, and something about that space—all the room in the world that belonged to Pearl—brought a new understanding to Bec. Pearl Delaney, she said to herself, now I see what it means for you to have come to America at only fourteen.

The sight of Pearl herself was cause for worry. In just three weeks she’d shrunk dramatically. Her eyes bulged from her face. Her dark hair was finally streaked with gray. She was silent as she ate, but she was alert, nodding as Tyler calmly reported the day’s news, the weather, who had come into the shop.

The next week Tyler asked Bec to accompany him again, though this time it was a Monday, and she had a feeling he’d ask her again on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday as well. Mrs. McMannus, she was told, wasn’t fond of Pearl and didn’t feel comfortable in her home. Well, then, Bec said to herself. What choice was there? “Is there any hope?” she asked.

“Hope, yes. But just now she can’t make a meal. Won’t you come?”

And Bec nodded.

She cooked that Monday, and then Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday, just as she’d suspected she would. It was on Thursday, after Bec had prepared for them all a simple meal of eggs and toast, and after Tyler had talked through the day’s business with Pearl, that Pearl asked Bec if she wouldn’t mind helping her scrub up. Bec nodded and rose.

In the tub Pearl shivered despite the heat pouring from the room’s clanking radiator. When Bec asked, Pearl turned her face to the ceiling so Bec could soap and rinse her hair. When Bec signaled, Pearl lifted an arm so Bec could reach the armpit. Bec didn’t know this new Pearl: subservient, silent, fragile. Toweling her off, Bec wrapped her arms around the woman and held her as if willing the old Pearl, feisty and bullish and mean, back to life.

And Pearl did seem to revive in the hour or so after that bath. The three of them were in Pearl’s bedroom, where they’d spent so many nights, but this time Pearl sat up readily, her hair still dripping, a touch of color at long last on her cheeks.

“You know,” Pearl said to Bec, “I was always worried about him.” She pointed at Tyler.

Bec leaned forward and fluffed Pearl’s pillows behind her head, then adjusted the towel on her shoulders. She suddenly liked being there, actually wanted to do for Pearl. In this way the bath had cleansed Bec, too. She threw another towel behind Pearl’s head. “You were saying?” Bec asked.

“I was saying I was always worried about him. Yes, about you, Tyler. Not your brother. Not your sister. But you were different from them. A little quiet, maybe. A little something. I told your father many a time to watch out for you, but he’d just shake his head. But I did worry. I didn’t think you could hold your own.”

Pearl stopped for a sip of tea, which inspired Bec to do the same. Tyler, sitting on the other side of Pearl’s bed, left his cup on the table beside him. He stared at Pearl, nodding as she recalled the days of his boyhood.

“No, no. I didn’t think you had it in you to hold your own, but then one night while I was minding you, that bully in the neighborhood came to taunt. All you kids were outside, the boys playing stickball, the girls watching on the sides, talking, and the bully—Jerry McAndrews, I think—was bothering one of you and then the next. You were twelve at the time, Tyler, and Jerry, maybe thirteen, went all the way down the line of the boys. A bad word for each and every one of you. And then he began with the girls—unable to stop himself, a mad rush of naughtiness. He called your sister ‘the ugliest on the street.’ Right in front of everyone. And that did it.”

Bec looked from Pearl to Tyler, who at this point seemed to be hearing the story, as she was, for the first time.

“Yes, that did it,” Pearl continued. “Insulting Margaret. That’s when you stepped forward, told Jerry McAndrews to shut his fat trap. Enough, you said. But you said it like a king, and that made all the difference.
Enough!
” Peal beamed, her eyes bulging all the more. “After that,” she continued, glancing at Tyler, “I knew you’d be okay.”

Tyler laughed quietly then turned to Bec. “Truth is, Jerry McAndrews would have killed me if
she
hadn’t come out right then.” Tyler held Pearl’s hand as he continued talking. He glanced from time to time at Bec. “She was minding us that night but still working, as she always was, for my father, and she burst from our house with her shears in one hand and a tape measure in the other. That’s what stopped him cold. Not me, but the sight of
her!
”

Pearl lifted her free hand, as if to gesture, but it fell limp beside her.

“What she was going to do with that tape measure,” Tyler continued, “I’ll never know.”

“If I couldn’t stab him I was going to measure him to death,” Pearl answered, nodding.

Tyler grinned, then sat back. His gaze was distant, as if he was recalling that day so long ago. Bec looked from him to Pearl. Pearl, too, seemed to be in a private world. Soon enough, Pearl fell asleep. Tyler didn’t move. The room felt vast, Bec noticed, without a story to fill it.

“You’re great old friends. I see that better than ever,” Bec said at long last. The comment saddened Tyler, who looked down as he nodded. “Come on,” Bec told him, helping him rise from his chair and then turning off the lamp beside Pearl’s bed. “Don’t worry. I promise. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

What Pearl said the next night surprised Bec even more than the story from the evening before. “I always knew your work was excellent. I just couldn’t say so.”

“That’s all in the past now,” Bec said.

“All in the past. Probably so,” Pearl said sadly.

“Pearl, you’ll pick up one of these days,” Tyler said, almost pleading. “You just need rest.”

Pearl closed her eyes and nodded. “Rest, yes,” she whispered.

An hour later, when Bec and Tyler rose to go, Pearl opened her eyes, surprising them. “Don’t forget to throw the water out the side window,” she managed to say.