Specimen Days (2 page)

If Simon was in heaven, it might be this. Lucas could imagine the souls of the departed walking eternally, with music rising from the cobblestones and curtains putting out their light. But would this be a heaven for Simon? His brother was (had been) loud and rampant, glad of his songs and his meals. What else had made him happy? He hadn't cared for curtains or dresses. He hadn't cared about Walt or the book. What had he wanted that this heaven could provide?

Broadway would be Lucas's heaven, Broadway and Catherine and the book. In his heaven he would be everything he saw and heard. He would be himself and Catherine; he would be the calliope and the lamps; he would be shoes striking pavement, and he would be the pavement under the shoes. He would ride with Catherine on the toy horse from Niedermeyer's window, which would be the size of an actual horse but perfect in the way of toys, moving serenely over the cobblestones on its bright red wheels.

He said, "I am large, I contain multitudes." A man in a topcoat, passing by, glanced at him strangely, as people did. The man would be among the angels in Lucas's heaven, just as plump and prosperous as he was on earth, but in the next world he would not consider Lucas strange. In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood.

The rooms when he returned to them were dim and silent. Here were the stove and the chairs and the carpet, its pattern ghostly in the dark. Here on the table was the music box that had ruined the family. It still stood cheerfully on the tabletop, a little casket with a rose carved into its lid. It could still play "Blow the Candle Out" and "Oh, Breathe Not His Name" as well as it did the day Mother bought it.

Here, too, were the faces, looking down from the walls, revered and consulted, dusted regularly:

Matthew at the center, six years old, dark-eyed and primly serious, rehearsing for the influenza that would make a picture of him a year later. Here was sly Uncle Ian, who found it humorous that he would one day be only a face on a wall; here the round satisfied countenance of Grandmother Aileen, who believed that living was a temporary inconvenience and death her true and only home. They were all, according to Mother, in heaven, though what she meant by heaven was an Ireland where no one starved.

Mother would have to make room for Simon's picture, but the wall was full. Lucas wondered if one of the older dead would have to be taken away.

He paused before the door to his parents bedroom. He felt their breathing on the other side, wondered over their dreams. He stood for a moment, alone in the slumbering darkness, before going into his and Simon's room.

Here was their bed, and above the bed the oval from which St. Brigid looked out, suffering and ecstatic, crowned by a fiery circle that Lucas had thought, when he was younger, represented her headache. Here were the pegs on which the clothes were hung, his and Simon's. St. Brigid looked sorrowfully at the empty clothes as she would at the vacant bodies of the faithful after their souls had gone. She seemed to be wondering, from under her circle of light, Where were the mechanisms of wish and need that had once worn shirts and trousers? Gone to heaven. Would it be like Broadway or Ireland? Gone to boxes in the earth. Gone into pictures and lockets, into rooms that refused to shed their memories of those who had eaten and argued and dreamed there.

Lucas undressed and got into the bed on Simon's side. Simon's pillow still smelled of Simon. Lucas inhaled. Here were Simon's humors: oil and sweat. Here was his undercurrent of tallow and his other smell, which Lucas could think of only as Simon, a smell that resembled bread but was not that, was merely the smell of Simon's body as it moved and breathed.

And there, visible through the window, were the lighted curtains of Emily Hoefstaedler across the air shaft. Emily worked with Catherine at Mannahatta, sewing sleeves onto bodices. She ate Turkish delight privately, from a silver tin she kept hidden in her room. She would be eating it now, Lucas thought, over there, behind the curtain. What would heaven be for Emily, who loved candy and had hungered for Simon? Would there be a Simon she could eat?

He lit the lamp, took the book from its place under the mattress. He began reading.

He read it again and again. Then he closed the book and held it up, looking at Walt's likeness, the small bearded face that gazed out from the paper. Although it was wicked to think so, he could not help believing that God must resemble Walt, with his shrewd, benevolent eyes and the edible-looking spill of his beard. He had seen Walt twice, walking in the streets, and he thought he had seen St. Brigid once, cloaked and melancholy, slipping into a doorway, wearing a hat to conceal her circle of light. He liked knowing they were in the world but preferred them as they resided here, on the paper and on the wall.

Lucas put the book back under the mattress. He extinguished the lamp. Across the air shaft, he could see the light of Emily's curtains. He buried his face in Simon's pillow. Simon was with them still. His pillow still smelled of him.

Lucas whispered into the pillow, "You should go away now. I really think it's time."

In the morning he made tea for himself and his father and put out some bread. His father sat at table with his breathing machine, a tube and a bellows on a metal pole, with three square, delicate feet. His mother hadn't risen yet.

When Lucas had eaten his bread and drunk his tea, he said, "Goodbye, Father."

His father looked at him, startled. He had been turned to leather by his years in the tannery. His burnished skin, fine-grained, fit perfectly on his big-jawed skull. His dark eyes were set like jewels. Simon's beauty, his large and defiant features, came mostly from their father. No one knew how Lucas had come to look as he did.

"G'bye, then," his father said. He raised the tube to his lips, drew in a mouthful of air. The little bellows rose and fell. Now that he was leather, with jewels for eyes, the machine did his breathing for him.

"Will you see to Mother?" Lucas asked. "Aye," his father said.

Lucas put his small hand on his father's brown one. He loved himself for loving his father. It was the best he could do.

"I'm off to the works," he said.

"Aye," his father answered, and took another breath from the tube. The machine was a gift from the tannery. They had given him the machine, and some money. There had been no money for Simon, because dying was his own fault.

Lucas kissed his father's forehead. His father's mind was leather now, too, but his goodness remained. All he had lost were his complications. He could still do what he needed to do. He could still love Lucas's mother and tend to her. Lucas hoped he could still do that.

He said, "I'll see you tonight, then." "Aye," his father answered.

On his way to the works, Lucas stopped at the school. He didn't enter. He went around to the side and looked through the window. He could see Mr. Mulchady frowning at his desk, the little flames from the lamps dancing on his spectacles. He could see the others hunched over their lessons. School would go on without him. Here as always were the desks and slates. Here were the two maps on the wall, the world and the stars. Lucas had only lately understood (he could be slow in some things) that the two were different. He'd believed, and had not thought to ask otherwise, that the stars were a version of the world, that they mirrored its countries and oceans. Why else would they be mounted side by side? When he was younger he had found New York on the map of the world and found its counterpart on the map of the stars, the Pleiades.

It was Mr. Mulchady who'd given Walt's book to Lucas, on loan. Mr. Mulchady said Lucas had the soul of a poet, which was kind of him but wrong. Lucas had no soul at all. He was a stranger, a citizen of no place, come from County Kerry but planted in New York, where he grew like a blighted potato; where he didn't sing or shout as the other Irish did; where he harbored not soul but an emptiness sparked here and there with painful shocks of love, for the map of the stars and the answering flames on Mr. Mulchady's spectacles; for Catherine and his mother and a horse on wheels. He did not mourn Simon; he had no convictions about heaven, no thirst for Christ's revivifying blood. What he wanted was the raucousness of the city, where people hauled their loads of corn or coal, where they danced to fiddles, wept or laughed, sold and begged and bartered, not always happily but always with a vigor that was what he meant, privately, by soul. It was a defiant, uncrushable aliveness. He hoped the book could instill that in him.

Now, abruptly, he was finished with school. He would have liked to say goodbye to Mr. Mulchady, but if he did Mr. Mulchady would ask him to return the book, and Lucas couldn't do that, not yet. He was still an empty suit of clothes. He hoped Mr. Mulchady wouldn't mind waiting.

He said goodbye, silently, to the classroom, to the maps and Mr. Mulchady.

The works was like a city unto itself. It was red brick walls and red brick towers, a gate big enough for six horses walking abreast. Lucas entered through the gate, among a crowd of boys and men. Some went quietly. Some spoke to one another, laughed. One said, "Fat, you never seen one as fat as her," and another said, "I like 'em fat." The boys and the younger men were pale. The older men had darkened.

Lucas, uncertain, walked with the others into a cobbled courtyard where stacks of brown-black iron, dusky as great bars of chocolate, stood against the red brick walls. He went with the others to a doorway at the courtyard's opposite end, an arched entrance with flickering dark inside.

He stopped there. The others moved around him. A man in a blue cap jostled him, cursed, walked on. The man would be eaten as Simon had been. What the machine did not care for would be put in a box and taken across the river.

Lucas couldn't tell whether he was meant to go in or to wait here. He thought it might be foolish to wait. The others were so certain, so loud but steady, like unruly soldiers on parade. He hated drawing attention to himself. But he thought, too, that if he went on he might be drawn forward into some error, obscure but irredeemable. He stood in an agony of doubt with the others flowing around him.

Soon Lucas was alone save for a few stragglers who hurried by him without seeming to see him at all. Finally it seemed an unspeakable mercy a man came from the building into the courtyard and said, "Are you Lucas?"

He was an immense gray-skinned man whose face, wide as a shovel, didn't move when he talked. Only his mouth moved, as if by magic a man made of iron had been given the power of speech.

"Yes," Lucas said.

The man looked at him skeptically. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. As he spoke, his mouth showed flashes of pink, livid in the gray face.

"I'm sound, sir. I can work as well as anybody."

"And how old are you?"

"Thirteen, sir," Lucas answered.

"You're not thirteen."

"I'm thirteen in another month."

The man shook his iron head. "This isn't work for a child."

"Please, sir. I'm stronger than I seem." Lucas settled his shoulders, striving to look sturdier.

"Well, they've given you the job. We'll see how you do."

Before he could stop himself, Lucas said, "Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you."

"What?"

"Please, sir," Lucas said. "I'll work hard. I can do anything."

"We'll see. I'm Jack Walsh."

Lucas held out his hand. Jack looked at it as if Lucas had offered him a lily. He took it in his own, pressed it hard enough to put the sting of tears in Lucas's eyes. If Walt was the book, Jack was the works. He was made of iron, with a living mouth.

"Come on," Jack said. "Let's get you started."

Lucas followed him through the entranceway, into a hall where men behind wire cages scowled over papers. Beyond the hall, they came to an enormous room lined with furnaces. Where the light from the furnaces didn't reach, it was twilight, a dull orange twilight that faded, in its remoter parts, to a bruised, furtive undark. The room reeked of heat and coal, of creosote. It rang and wheezed. Furies of sparks swirled up, skittish as flies. Among the sparks, men stood before the furnaces, stoking the fires with long black poles.

"This is coking," Jack said, and said no more. Did he mean "cooking"? Lucas thought he would ask his questions later.

Jack escorted him past the row of furnaces, under a chaos of black hooks and leather pulleys that depended from the high ceiling, touched here and there by small incidences of orange firelight. A portal that opened from the room where the coking (the cooking?) was done led onto another room, equally large but dimmer, lined on either side by the gray-brown bulks of machines as preposterous and grand as elephants, machines made up of belts and beams and wheels turning with sharp squeals and groans. The room was like a stable or a dairy. It was full of steady, creaturely life.

"Cutting and stamping," Jack said. "This is where you'll be."

The atmosphere of the cutting-and-stamping room was dust, but bright dust, drifting silvery particles that winked and glimmered in the sluggish light. Men stood at the machines engaged in mysterious efforts, bent over, straining with their shoulders and thighs. Lucas saw that the men, like Jack, had taken on the color of the room. Were they dying or just becoming more like the air?