She thought of his own pale hands, big farmer’s hands that belonged to a stouter man. His thick shoes, a piece of straw sometimes caught in a cuff or entangled in the frayed laces.
The door was ajar. The glass transom above it was closed. It was a cold bright afternoon in midwinter. The room was poor. The slipcover she’d made to hide the scorched couch was ill-fitting, the fabric dull, as if faded. The picture she’d hung above it was too small for the wide wall. It was a heavily framed oil of the Sacred Heart, the image darkened by time. It had arrived in the donation basket—the frame was chipped and there was a tear in the canvas. “Coals to Newcastle,” Sister Illuminata had said when she saw it, but little Sally was enamored, and Annie herself had felt some piety when she hung it up—stood on the couch in her bare feet, drove the nail, Sally watching her from the floor. It seemed a pretension now. In her time at the convent, her eyes had grown accustomed to authentic elegance—the beautiful house itself, built for a wealthy man: the gleaming woods, the simple chandeliers, the plaster ceiling roses and graceful corbels. There was no denying that this bare room was a poor woman’s room, an immigrant’s small space. No denying that its spare cleanliness betrayed an immigrant’s reserve. Twice since Jim died, she’d hung it with new paper—and now as she waited, she could see in the far corner that the latest attempt had already begun to curl. Twice she had repainted the kitchen walls, the bedroom walls.
He would find the place clean and well-ordered when he appeared.
She had a moment’s doubt that he would indeed appear, a moment’s fear that he had misunderstood her meaning, or disapproved of it, when she pressed the key into his hand. She dismissed both notions.
The Sisters said his own place was also neat as a pin. It was, she suspected, another kind of pretension, this immigrant reserve. A clean and well-ordered veneer over the trouble of a bedridden wife, a dead husband, over loneliness and worry.
The door was ajar. Through it, she heard what she knew was the sound of his footstep—although it might be the footstep of anyone—and then his shadow, hesitating. She stood. He was there. She opened the door just enough to admit him. Smell of the stable on his clothes, but also, now, the smell of alcohol and of pine soap, as if he had stopped before he came up. Stopped to take a drink. To wash his hands.
He took off his cap and smoothed back his hair, what there was of it. The bareness of his poor scalp moved her with pity, a sympathetic affection. It was an infant’s delicate skull; it was a reminder that he was not young.
In this light his eyes were merely brown, although in the sun she sometimes saw green and black and gold.
He put his hand to her chin and she touched his cheek, knowing her fingertips were rough. A sound arose from the cluttered backyard and rattled the kitchen window. It was the familiar tapping of city grit, or wind-lifted leaves, or maybe a pigeon’s wing against the glass. A sound that might once have filled her with fanciful notions: Jim’s breath in her ear, his hand on her hip, something restored to her.
As they both turned toward the noise, she saw his eyes catch the painting on her wall, the familiar image of Christ, sorrowful, compassionate, barely visible in the darkening oils but for the pale hand that gestured toward a heart threaded with thorns.
And then they both turned their eyes away from it.
“Are we alone?” he whispered.
She said, “We are.”
Rose
WE HAD ON OUR FATHER’S SIDE a great-great-aunt, Aunt Rose. A tiny woman, very old. We recall a velvet hat and a pale broadcloth suit, rose-colored perhaps, and maybe the smell of rosewater about her as she made her way into the house—one gloved hand steadying herself on the long server that had been our grandmother’s, one skimming the backs of the chairs that lined the dining table, skimming our cheeks as well as she encountered us, one by one. Our father behind her, carrying her bags, saying, “Step aside,” telling us, “Say ‘Good afternoon,’” “Say ‘Pardon me.’” Our father—the doorman’s son—banging her two suitcases against the chair legs and setting the porcelain in the china cabinet ringing.
This was in the drafty house in Hempstead where we grew up. It was an old house, red-shingled and white-trimmed, plagued with an endless series of tumble-down catastrophes that made our father in midlife a caricature of the hapless, city-bred, suburban homeowner. We recall him prowling through the rooms with a stepladder on his shoulder, with a hammer or a socket wrench in his hands, doing no good. Our mother, when she was well, always smiling indulgently, following him with her eyes.
The old Hempstead house. We recall the battered glass knob of the side door, our shoulders to its peeling paint. A nest of boots and shoes inside, no matter the season, a tattered rag rug, the dark basement-breath of heating oil and cinderblock and cold dirt. Then three steps up to the narrow kitchen—dark green countertops, black linoleum floor flecked with red, red cabinets, appliances of enamel and steel, scent of clove and cinnamon and sunlight and dust. The narrow passage to the dining room. Lace tablecloth, lace doilies, lace curtains at the window, and beyond it, a continuation of lace, the apple tree in full, wind-scattered bloom, or maybe a sudden shower of snow, as old Aunt Rose steadied herself, coming into the house, one gloved hand on the long server that had been our grandmother’s, one running along our cheeks.
Just where she had come from and why she had appeared remained uncertain. “Upstate,” we were told. “Because she is old,” we were told. She was given the guest room, and directed by our father, we followed her halting journey up the stairs with our hands poised at her elbows or at her hips. She trembled, we recall, either because of her great age or because of her delight at our elaborate courtesies.
The guest room on the third floor of the old Hempstead house was narrow beneath the eaves, painted yellow, white curtains at the window.
Downstairs again, our father told the story of Great-aunt Rose and Red Whelan. Up in Poughkeepsie this was, he said. Just after the Civil War. A knock at the door when the family was at dinner. Rose only a small child. A man invited in: red hair, red skin, scarred red flesh from neck to ear as if a plow had scraped his face. One leg and one arm, so that he, too, Red Whelan, made a halting climb to the upstairs room—tap of crutch on each stair tread, on the attic’s bare wood. Patrick, our great-grandfather, a young schoolteacher by then, standing silently in the room’s narrow doorway as Red Whelan was shown the bed, the washstand, a small desk, and a wide wing chair, all the family had done to prepare the place for him. The room where he would live out his days.