Once Ed started talking, the dam broke. They went out once a week to eat in Manhattan, and the conversation turned often to their early years. She found out that in grammar school Ed was a model student, but by the time he reached high school he’d turned his back on his studies. After he was kicked out of his second school, Cora used her influence in the parish to get him admitted on probation to Power Memorial in Manhattan. The long train rides settled him down enough to get him graduated. He took a job mixing paints and dyes at the Kohnstamm factory on Columbia Street, a short walk from home. He brought his paychecks home to his mother.
At Kohnstamm’s, Ed said, he found someone to look up to—the scientist who directed the mixers. The chemical processes awoke a scholarly impulse in him that had lain dormant. He got to know the chemicals so well that soon other men began coming to him instead of checking the manuals. He moved over to Domino for a better paycheck, turning slag into sugar, paying attention to the reactions, the reagents, the products. He began taking night classes at a community college, then quit Domino to enroll full-time at St. Francis College, where his younger brother Phil was a student. Cora paid both their tuitions with the money she’d saved from what Ed brought home.
Their flat had no hallway. To get from the kitchen to the living room, you had to brush against the foot of every bed, one of which Ed shared with Phil until he was twenty-one, when his sister Fiona got married and moved to Staten Island. Until the day Hugh brought a desk home from his office, Ed and Phil studied together at the kitchen table, the only good surface to spread out on. Cora never had to call them to dinner; she only had to tell them to put their books away.
Friday nights, when his friends were out, Ed waited for the bartender’s call. He would pull up in front and honk, and Hugh would keep him waiting while he had another. Ed wouldn’t go in, because he didn’t want to watch his father drink. Once, he waited so long that he woke up slamming the brakes, thinking he’d nodded off while driving and was about to plow into the car in front of him. He started beating on the horn; a few guys came out to see what was the matter. Hugh joined them and stared as if it were somebody else’s crazy kid. Ed kept slamming on the horn. When he finally stopped, his father screamed at him. After that, Ed said, when he drove up he gave a quick toot and shut the car off.
Ed was named to the Duns Scotus Honor Society, like Phil the year before. They were the first pair of brothers in St. Francis’s history to receive the honor.
? ? ?
They were at Lüchow’s on Fourteenth Street, eating Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, when Ed told her about the day his father died.
“A few days before I graduated,” he said, “my father had a heart attack on the couch. I drove him to the hospital. I must have flown through every light. I had my arm on him to keep him from slumping forward”—Ed pressed it against her to show her—“like I did when I picked him up at the bar. I was burning through intersections. When I got there, I saw that he’d died. I slapped his face a few times. Then I threw him over my shoulder and ran him in.”
Only after Ed had heard definitively that his father was gone, while he sat weeping in the waiting room area, did he realize he’d wrenched his back. As he alternated in spasms of grief and pain, he understood that he loved all the things he’d always thought he’d hated about carrying his father’s body home all those nights: the weight of him hanging on him, pulling at the sockets of his arms; the drunken heat that came off him; the roughness of his beard against Ed’s neck; the soft sound of his voice as he mumbled; the sickly sweet smell of whiskey.
“There are things you feel that you can’t explain,” Ed said. “You know other people won’t understand them.”
“I know just what you mean.” She was thinking she was referring to how she’d felt at times about her own parents. Then she realized she was feeling something like it just then for Ed. You had to hope the love you felt would get recorded in the book of time. “You don’t have to say another word,” she said.
9
She wanted to buy her husband-to-be a luxurious wedding gift. It happened that her father’s best friend, in addition to regularly occupying the stool next to him at Hartnett’s—where her father had shifted from Doherty’s when he’d started going back to pubs—was a vice president at Longines, which distributed LeCoultre in North America. For six hundred dollars, Eileen purchased a prototype of the next line of LeCoultre watches. It was slung with a beautiful eighteen-karat gold band and would have retailed for two thousand dollars. She paid in three installments.
She tried to think of a creative inscription that would encapsulate her feelings for him, some intimate notion to commit to posterity, but everything she came up with sounded too fanciful by half. In the end she settled on his full name, middle included, and hoped he’d hear a rough sort of poetry in the lack of embellishment and a tenderness in the identification of him as her man.
They went to Tavern on the Green a week before the wedding. They emerged from the subway and took a horse and carriage up to the entrance. She had never been to the Tavern before. She loved the banquet tables, the big picture windows, the austerity of the trees in winter.
She presented the watch to Ed after the salad course. He undid the bow, neatly removed the green foil wrapping, opened the box, and held the watch.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. Without trying it on, he put it back in the box. “I can’t take it, though. I’m not the kind of man who’s ever thought of wearing a gold watch. You should return it to the store.”
In an astonished instant she’d gone beyond words, beyond anger, to a disappointment so deep it made her stomach ache.
“It’s a prototype, Ed. I can’t.” She refolded the napkin in her lap, smoothed down the silk of her dress.
“Why not?”
“It’s unique.”
“I’m sure they’d listen—”
“It’s engraved, goddammit.”
Ed was still talking, but she didn’t hear him. Quickly, dispassionately, she ran through the mechanics of how she would exit the restaurant. She wouldn’t say a word. She would of course leave the watch on the table. She would go home and tell her parents that the wedding was off. She was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see her father in a top hat and tails. A busboy stacked and removed the salad plates, and now another stopped to replenish their water glasses, taking his time to keep too many ice cubes from tumbling out of the pitcher. His conscientious presence was the only reason she hadn’t risen yet.
“Maybe you could have them take off this gold band and put a leather one on it for me instead, if you don’t want to take it back,” this man to whom she’d sworn her devotion was saying in lordly ignorance of how far from him she’d flown in her mind, how almost absurdly vulnerable he was to her at that moment. “I’m a regular guy. I don’t know how to wear a watch like this.”
She saw how unfathomably easy it could be for her to walk out on her own life. She was awash in sudden sympathy for Ed. Then the cloudburst passed, and she sat in a little puddle of resentment over how benighted and pinched her future husband was.
They endured a tense dinner, even managed to make it through dessert. After they’d risen to leave, a surge of spite compelled her to fish the watch out of her pocketbook and make him read the engraving on its back.
He looked at it quietly. For a moment, it occurred to her that he might be moved enough to change his mind, and she grew unaccountably nervous. Then he handed it back.
“I’ll give you love and devotion and work hard all my life,” he said. “And I appreciate your getting this for me, more than I could say. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten. But I know I’m not going to wear it. If you take it back, we can put that money in an account to send our kids to college. I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am. I wish I could. It’d be easier sometimes to be someone else. Right now, for instance. You look so beautiful tonight. I hate that I’ve disappointed you.”
A couple of days later, her father saw Ed and asked where the watch was. When Ed told the truth—it was home in the box, he didn’t feel comfortable putting it on—her father didn’t react with the fury she’d anticipated. Ed’s answer put him in a contemplative mood.
Later that night, her father called her into his room. “There’s a reason he can’t accept nice things,” he said. “His family’s been in this country a hundred years, but they never owned a house. That’s a sin. If you’re not in a house by the time I’m dead, I’ll haunt you from my grave.”