The movement of the train was with her still, in her back and under her feet, as she walked down her own block with her suitcase and then up the familiar steps. There was no one in the entry. No Mrs. Gertler perched in her window on the parlor floor. That was lucky, too. She climbed the stairs. It was early afternoon, but her lack of sleep, her unplanned return, made the hour of the day seem uncertain and strange. Just forty-eight hours ago, she had said her goodbyes to this place, folded into her view of herself the romantic notion that many years would pass before she saw it again. It would not take much imagination, tired as she was, to believe that time had, indeed, intervened and she was returning like some Odysseus, much older and much changed.
Life goes by in the blink of an eye. It would not take any imagination to convince herself that it already had.
Her mother’s voice reached her through the open transom above the apartment door. Her mother’s laughter. Distinct and familiar and yet, as well, indistinguishable from the man’s voice that ran just beneath it. A man’s voice low but rising, rising and falling in a kind of enumerating rhythm, the rhythm of a tale being told, a joke or a story. Inside the apartment, a man was telling her mother a story and her mother was laughing, laughing here and there. There was always something enviable about her mother’s laugh. Ever since she was a child, Sally flew to it. Put up her arms, put her hands to her mother’s broad cheeks to say, What? What?
She thought of Sister Jeanne, raising her face to the sound of it, as if to a warm sun.
Sally eased open the door. Placed her suitcase beside the couch. From the living room she could see that the man had drawn a dining chair into the kitchen doorway. He was sitting in it crookedly, his back to her. He was in shirtsleeves and had his hands in his pant pockets. Her mother was in the kitchen just beyond him, at the stove, but in easy reach. She was frying something in a pan—the spit and sizzle of ham. She was laughing. He was talking. Never in Sally’s experience had a man in shirtsleeves sat in the kitchen doorway in this way, talking to her mother in this way. Not as a visitor would, but as one who was utterly at home in, utterly familiar with, these few rooms. She moved closer, through the living room, to the long sideboard.
From where she paused she could see him better. His hair was black and touched with gray, thick over his neck but thin at the top. His shoulders in his striped shirt were wide. He was collarless. In the glass of the kitchen’s single window she could see a vague reflection of his face: broad forehead, pale, and dark eyes made shadowy by the reflection. “‘Are you telling me?’” he was saying, and Sally recognized the brogue. “‘Are you telling me,’ I asked him, ‘that after all this time…’”
“After all that time,” her mother said without turning, laughing with him, her hips moving, the hem of her long skirt moving, moving with her laughter, and her voice—what was it about her voice that was so new?—bright, easy, warm. Both of their voices so familiar in the exchange. When had she ever heard such a thing in these rooms? When had she ever seen such a thing?
Telling us later, she said, “I had to rub my eyes.”
And then she saw, with an intake of breath, a cry of surprise, that the man’s thin white feet were bare on the linoleum floor.
“Glory be to God,” her mother said, and the man, turning, sat up in his chair. Not Jim at all, not her father returned to them, to her, returned to life in the interval of her departure, but Mr. Costello, the milkman, struggling to stand now, politely, long bare feet and all.
In the bedroom, the sheets and the coverlet were folded down. There was the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, the smell of flesh, some paler, warmer version of the human air of the train. The man’s worn jacket was draped over a chair. His empty shoes placed side by side at the foot of the bed. Her mother followed her there and closed the door behind her.
“You’re back,” she said. Her hair was loose. Her cheeks flushed red. She had grown younger in Sally’s short time away. “What’s happened? You frightened the life out of me.” She paused, and together, mother and daughter took in the tumbled room, the counterpane, the white coat, the man’s two empty shoes at the foot of the bed.
“You’re back,” her mother said again, but this time as if she understood it plainly.
Sally took in the room, what had been her room, her own bed.
She turned to her mother. She felt the sensation of a plunge, with not even a stranger’s shoulder beside her.
“And where will you go?” her mother asked her.
*
WHEN THE TWO WOMEN RETURNED to the living room, Mr. Costello—in his bare feet—was standing undecided by the front door with his head bowed, like a man waiting for an elevator. Shyly, he looked up at her mother, and then, as they passed him, he slipped into the bedroom.
Her mother told her to sit at the table. Sally noticed that the dining room chair had been neatly returned to its place. Moments later, her mother brought two plates with the ham and the eggs. She sat down with her daughter. Mr. Costello appeared in his shoes and his white coat and his hair combed down and his cap in his hands. He said, “I’ll be going, then,” politely, and her mother only looked up briefly—and the affection in her eyes was both brand-new and immediately familiar, a reminder of something Sally had always known: the strength of her mother’s capacity to love, the assurance of it.
“Goodbye, dear,” her mother said.
They ate in silence. All was tasteless in her mouth. She felt again the movement of the train beneath her. If she closed her eyes, she knew, she could make herself believe she was still on board, in the suffocating darkness, looking out to this dancing light—this room, this day, her mother’s sure hands, her living presence, her happiness—looking out at it all with what might have been her father’s own eyes: envious, lonesome, buried, bereft.
The Substitute
MRS. TIERNEY SAID, “Take Patrick, then. He’s got his name.”
Mr. Tierney said, “I will.”
It was the end of the argument. They were both red-faced. Both licked the spittle of shouted words from their lips, satisfied. His parents’ arguments, our father said, erupted suddenly, like a street fight, and then, just as rapidly, concluded. Peace descended. Something like happiness.
Their six children came to understand that a certain satisfaction might be found in setting a beloved’s blood boiling.
A telegram had arrived from Poughkeepsie: Mr. Tierney’s father was dead. Mr. Tierney said he must go to the funeral, and Mrs. Tierney asked if he was going to do her the indignity of expecting her to accompany him. He said no, but he would take the children. She said she would not have them missing school for a man they’d never met. He said he would take only the boys, then. She said Michael’s job was already hanging by a thread.
“I won’t stay long,” Mr. Tierney said.
Mrs. Tierney said, “You’re a fool to go at all.”
“I’m his only child,” Mr. Tierney said.
“Didn’t he know that himself?” Mrs. Tierney replied.
“I won’t be plagued by his ghost,” Mr. Tierney shouted.
“He had no use for you when he was alive,” Mrs. Tierney said coolly. “Why would he be coming to you dead?”
“There’s ice water in your veins,” he said.
“There’s sawdust in your head.”
“He’s dead.”
“He let your mother die without you.”
“I didn’t know.”
“The bastard didn’t tell you.”
“He was bitter.”
“He was hateful. He hated me.”
“Us.”
“Us, then.”
“Have a heart. There was a monkey on his back. That cripple in the room upstairs.”