Aunt Rose patted the shoulder of his fine suit. “You are,” she said, a kind of encouragement.
But Red Whelan said nothing. The small eyes in his broad face looked up briefly, passed over him, and then fell again to the tip of his crutch. He moved the crutch to another part of the slate, hopped a bit to follow it, his one shoe broad and worn, his breath laboring. Aunt Rose gripped his arm. Something of the mothball odor of his own clothes as Red Whelan brushed past him.
The two climbed the steps, Aunt Rose beside the old man, her arm across his back. Red Whelan paid no attention to the doorman either, but, head down, back bent, made his way into the black interior of the house, his medal—for it was indeed a medal on a grimy ribbon, although there was no telling (our father told us) if it was his—swaying against the worn fabric of his soldier’s coat.
Neither of them, father or son—the handsome fruit of Red Whelan’s sacrifice—of any interest at all to the old man, no worthy impediment at all to his determination to go inside and have his lunch.
At the door, Aunt Rose nodded to his father as he held back the screen and then went in with her charge. The corpulent friend went in as well. Patrick, too, climbed the stairs, thinking to follow them, but his father took a pinch of his sleeve and told him to wait. Together, father and son stood at the opened door until all the funeral guests had gone in, Michael greeting each, “Good day,” “Fine weather.” Some recognized him and offered condolences. Others leaned into their companions even as they crossed the threshold to ask who he was. When the last had gone in, and no more cars moved slowly down the street, Michael Tierney closed the screen door gently and returned his fine bowler to his head, giving its rim, as he liked to do, that extra, two-fingered skim.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They had only made it to the bottom of the steps when a female voice, thickly Irish, called after them. “You’re not coming in?”
Father and son turned to see a dark-haired maid behind the screen, a bundle of women’s coats in her arms. She wore a white cap with a black ribbon, and although the screen was a kind of veil, she was clearly a beauty, big-eyed, sweet-faced.
“We’re not,” Michael Tierney said.
Halfway down the slate path, father and son turned again to see her. She was still behind the screen. The father tucked his hand up beneath his son’s arm, pulling him away. “Let’s not have you marrying any Irish housemaids,” he said wryly. “Let’s not have history repeating itself.”
The two had lunch together, looking so sharp, in the elegant restaurant of a local hotel. His father carried a flask from which he poured himself two whiskies before their steaks arrived, and then two more to have with his coffee.
On the train ride home his father said—under the influence, no doubt—“I wonder if it irked my father to see Red Whelan outlive him. I wonder if he thought, as he lay dying, that perhaps for three hundred dollars more Red Whelan would take his place again.”
He told his son how Red Whelan had come back from the war, a knock at the door one evening while the family was at dinner. His own father but a young man then. How Red Whelan, a young man, too, was brought upstairs to the attic room he would have for the rest of his life. Aunt Rose, just a child, wordlessly taking on the responsibility that she bore even now, and would bear into the future, or at least until that day—not far away, it would seem—when Red Whelan’s life finally came to a close. “Lord knows what she’ll do with herself then,” he said. “She’ll be both an old maid and a kind of widow. No family but myself.” And then added, “And you children.”
As the train came into the city, Mr. Tierney said the last time he saw his father, the man had grabbed him up under the arm as they stood on the very same threshold he had not crossed this afternoon. Michael Tierney was leaving home for the last time. Elizabeth Breen, his Lizzie, was meeting him at the train. They would be married the next morning in Brooklyn, where her family lived. “Is this what Red Whelan threw away an arm and a leg for?” his father asked him. (Our father, telling us the story, added, “Thus coining a phrase.”) “So the fruit of his sacrifice can drag us back to the slums?”
The man whispering his furious question, as if Red Whelan, two floors above and without half his hearing, might catch the words.
“You can be sure I didn’t whisper my reply,” Michael Tierney said as the train returned to the city. “I spoke it clearly, right into his face. I said, ‘One life’s already been given to save your skin. I won’t give you mine as well.’ Those were the last words we ever exchanged.”
He turned to his son, his teeth bared beneath the polished mustache and his eyes briefly pained. But the pain quickly slipped away. He smiled. “It’s all the past,” he said, and reached out again to touch the boy’s knee. He looked him over fondly, brushed the lapel of the new suit. “Still,” he added—the whiskey had made him flushed—“I might have forgiven him. The old bastard.”
Patrick said, “He might have forgiven you.”
*
ONE MORE RECOLLECTION of that day:
Late that night, after he’d been some hours asleep, Patrick woke in the darkness. His brother Tom slept soundly in the next bed. No stirring in the room beside them where his four sisters sometimes laughed or fought or tapped the wall in the middle of the night. Street noise, sure, but faint at this hour, and nothing to tell him why he woke so fully and so abruptly, wide-eyed in the darkness. In the darkness, he recalled the wooden coffin, gleaming with sunlight, as it went down into the fresh-cut earth. He thought of Red Whelan’s cold failure to acknowledge him, the shining, spiffy, living fruit of the old man’s sacrifice. He recalled his mother laughing as she said, If he’s going to haunt anyone, it will be Patrick.
He looked to the vague, pale blue—ghostly, yes—light at the one window. Was there a face in the glass? Was that a cat yowling in the back of the house, or a banshee? A lost soul? He imagined his own soul—a pale, startled version of himself—clutched in his bitter grandfather’s bony hands like a thin blue rag. He imagined being dragged through the empty streets outside, lamplight and darkness, black wet pavement, fences and fire escapes and tumbled yards—slums, his grandfather had called them—up, up, up, into utter darkness.
Tom waking tomorrow to find only his brother’s body in the bed, a hollow shell, empty-eyed, thin-skinned. Only dust. Is this what Red Whelan lost an arm and a leg for?