Brooklyn (21 page)

"How long is it going to take?" she asked.

"An hour, maybe more, it depends on how many stops it makes. But cheer up, think of the big waves."

The beach, when they finally arrived, was almost as packed as the train had been. She noticed that Tony had not lost his smile once during the journey, despite being deliberately squashed against a door by a man, encouraged by his wife. Now he seemed to feel, as he studied the crowd on the beach, where there was no place for newcomers, that they had been put there for his amusement. They moved along the boardwalk, but the only solution, Eilis saw, was to take a tiny spot that was empty and see if, by their very presence there, they could expand it so they both could unpack their belongings and lie in the sun.

Diana and Patty had warned her that no one changed on the beach in Italy. Italians had carried to America with them the custom of putting their bathing suits on under their clothes before they set out, thus avoiding the Irish habit of changing on the beach, which was, Diana said, ungraceful and undignified, to say the least. Eilis did not know if they were joking so she checked with Miss Fortini, who assured her that it was true. Miss Fortini also insisted that she should lose more weight and brought in a small pink-coloured razor for her and told her that she need not return it. Despite all this preparation, Eilis was nervous about taking off her clothes and appearing in her swimsuit in front of Tony; her efforts to pretend that it was nothing made her even more embarrassed. She wondered if he would notice that she had shaved and she felt she was too white and that her thighs and her bottom were too fat.

Tony stripped down to his bathing trunks instantly and, she was glad to see, nonchalantly looked at the crowds around them as she wriggled out of her clothes. As soon as she was ready, he wanted to go into the sea. He arranged with the family beside them that their things would be looked after and they made their way past the crowds down to the water's edge. Eilis laughed when she saw him recoiling from the cold; the water, compared to the water in the Irish Sea, seemed quite warm to her. She waded out while he struggled to follow her.

As she swam out, he stood helplessly up to his waist in the water, and when she motioned for him to follow her, shouting that he was not to be a baby, he shouted back that he could not swim. She did a gentle breaststroke in his direction and then slowly realized, by seeing what the couples around them were up to, what his plan was. He wanted, it seemed, the two of them to stand up to their necks in the water, holding each other as each wave crashed over them. When she embraced him, he held her so that she could not easily swim away from him. She could feel his erect penis hard against her, which made him smile even more than usual, and, when he wanted to put his hands on her bottom as he held her, she swam away from him. The thought had come into her mind of telling him who the last person to touch her bottom was. The idea of his reaction to this made her laugh so much that she did a vigorous backstroke, letting him presume, she hoped, that he was being too free under the water with his hands.

All day they moved between their place on the beach and the ocean. She put on her sun hat and he raised the umbrella to prevent sunburn and he also produced a picnic that his mother had prepared for him, including a thermos of ice-cold lemonade. In the water, the few times that she swam out on her own, she felt that the waves were stronger than at home, not so much in the way they broke but in the way they pulled out. She realized that she would have to be careful not to swim too far out of her depth in this unfamiliar sea. Tony, she saw, was afraid of the water, hated her swimming away from him. As soon as she returned to him each time, he made her put her arms around his neck and he lifted her from below so that her legs were wrapped around him. When he kissed her and then held her face back and looked at her, he seemed not to be embarrassed by his erection at all but proud of it. He was all boyish as he grinned at her; she, in turn, felt a great tenderness towards him and kissed him deeply as he held her. As the day waned, they were almost the last remaining in the water.

When Eilis complained of the heat at work they told her that it was only the beginning, but one day Miss Fortini told her that Mr. Bartocci was about to turn on the air-conditioning and soon the place would be crowded with shoppers seeking relief from the heat. Her job, Miss Fortini said, was to make them all buy something.

Soon, Eilis looked forward to going to work, and longed, as she woke sweating in the night, for the air-conditioning in Bartocci's. In the evening Mrs. Kehoe put chairs out in front of the house and they sat there fanning themselves even in the shade, even after dark some nights. On Eilis's half-day Tony took a half-day too and they went to Coney Island and came back late. When she asked him if they could have a go on the huge wheel or one of the other amusements, he refused, managing each time to find an excuse why they could not. He gave her no hint that he had lost his previous girlfriend because he took her on the wheel. Eilis was fascinated by this, the easy, casual way he prevented them from going there, his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.

As the summer wore on he could talk nothing except baseball. The names he told her about-names like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Preacher Roe-were the names she also heard about at work and saw mentioned in the newspapers. Even Mrs. Kehoe spoke about these players as though she knew them. She had gone the previous year to the house of her friend Miss Scanlan to watch a game on her television, and, since she was a Dodgers supporter, as she told everyone, she intended to do so again if Miss Scanlan, who was also a Dodgers supporter, would have her.

It seemed to Eilis for a while that no one spoke of anything else except the need to defeat the Giants. Tony told her with real excitement that he had secured tickets for Ebbets Field not only for himself and Eilis but for his three brothers and it was going to be the best day of their lives because they were going to get revenge for what Bobby Thomson had done to them the previous season. As he walked through the streets with her Tony was not alone in doing imitations of his favourite players and shouting about the hopes he had for them.

She tried to tell him about the Wexford hurling team and how they were beaten by Tipperary and how her brothers and her father used to sit glued to the old radiogram in the front room on summer Sundays even if Wexford were not playing. When he began to imitate the commentators, describing imaginary games of his own, she told him that Jack her brother had done the same.

"Hold on," he said. "You play baseball in Ireland?"

"No, it was hurling."

He seemed puzzled.

"So it wasn't baseball?" His face registered disappointment, then a sort of exasperation.

One night in the parish hall when the band, which had been playing swing tunes, began to play a tune that Tony seemed to recognize, he went crazy, as did many around him. "It's the Jackie Robinson song," he shouted. He began to swing an imaginary baseball bat. "They're playing 'Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?'"

As soon as Eilis returned to her classes at Brooklyn College the baseball frenzy became worse. What surprised her was that she had noticed nothing of it the previous year although it must have been going on around her with the same intensity. Now she had returned to her routine of seeing Tony on Thursday nights after class, on Friday nights in the parish hall and on Saturday for a movie, and he talked of nothing except how this would be the perfect year for him if they could be together, Eilis and himself, and if Laurence and Maurice and Frankie could be with them too and if the Dodgers could win the World Series. To her great relief, he made no further mention of having kids who would be Dodgers supporters.

She walked with the four brothers through the crowds to Ebbets Field. They had left themselves plenty of time to stop and talk to anyone at all who had news of the players, or opinions about how the game would go, or to buy hot dogs and sodas, to linger outside, part of the crush. Slowly, the differences between the brothers became more apparent to her. While Maurice smiled and seemed easygoing, he did not speak to strangers and held himself back when the others did. Tony and Frank stayed close to each other all the time, Frank eager to know what Tony's latest opinion was. Laurence seemed to know most about the game and could easily contradict some of Tony's assertions. She laughed at Frank as he looked from Tony to Laurence when they argued about the merits of Ebbets Field itself, Laurence insisting it was too small and old-fashioned and would have to be moved, Tony answering that it would never be moved. Frank's eyes darted from one brother to the other; he appeared genuinely perplexed. Maurice never got involved in the arguments but managed to move them forward in the direction of the field, warning them that they were going too slowly.

When they found their seats, they put Eilis in the middle with Tony and Maurice on either side of her, Laurence on Tony's left and Frank to the right of Maurice.

"Mom told us we weren't to leave you at the edge," Frank said to her.

Both Tony and her fellow lodgers had explained the rules of the game to Eilis and made it seem like rounders, which she had played at home with her brothers and their friends; still she did not know what to expect because rounders, she thought, was fine in its way but it had never provoked the same excitement as hurling or football. At Mrs. Kehoe's the night before Miss McAdam had insisted that it was the best game in the world but all of the others thought that it was too slow, with too many breaks. Diana and Patty agreed that the best part was going off to get hot dogs and sodas and beers and finding that nothing important had happened while you were away, despite all the shouting and cheering.

"It was stolen from us the last time, that's all I have to say," Mrs. Kehoe said. "It was a very bitter moment."

Now, with half an hour to go before the game, everyone around them was behaving as though it was just about to begin. Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all. Normally, he was attentive, smiling at her, asking her questions, listening to her, telling her stories. Now, in the heat of this excitement, he could no longer manage the role of caring, thoughtful boyfriend. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard. He could not stay quiet, standing up and sitting back down and craning his neck to see what was going on behind. All the while Maurice, who had bought a programme, perused it and regularly offered Eilis and his three brothers nuggets of information that he had gleaned. He seemed worried.

"If we lose this game Tony will go crazy," he said to her. "And if we win he'll go even more crazy and Frankie with him."

"So which would be better," she asked, "win or lose?"

"Win," he said.

Tony and Frank went to get more hot dogs and beers and sodas.

"Keep our seats," Tony said, and grinned.

"Yeah, keep our seats," Frank repeated.

When the players finally appeared, all four brothers jumped up and vied with one another to identify them, but quite soon, when something happened that seemed to displease Tony, he sat back in his seat, despondent. For a moment he held her hand.

"They're all against us," he said.

But when the game started Tony launched into a running commentary that rose to a climax every time there was any action. Sometimes, when Tony was quiet, Frank took over and drew their attention to something, only to be told to stop by Maurice, who watched each second with slow and deliberate intensity, hardly speaking at all. He was, nonetheless, she felt, even more involved and excited than Tony, despite all the shouting, cheering, cajoling and whooping that Tony did.

She simply could not follow the game, could make no sense of how you would score, or what constituted a good hit or a bad one. Nor could she work out which player was which. And it was as slow as Patty and Diana had said it would be. She knew, however, that she should not go to the bathroom because it was possible that the very moment she announced her departure would be the moment no one wanted her to miss.

As she sat quietly watching the game, trying to understand its intricate rituals, it struck Eilis that Tony, despite his constant movements and his screaming at Frank to pay attention to some score or other, and his cheering followed by statements of pure despair, did not manage to irritate her even once. She thought it was strange, and out of the side of her eye and sometimes directly she started to watch him, noticing how funny he was, how alive, how graceful, how alert to things. She began to appreciate also how much he was enjoying himself; he was doing so even more than his brothers, more openly, with greater humour and infectious ease. She did not mind, indeed she almost enjoyed the fact that he was paying her no attention, leaving it to Maurice to explain when he could what was happening.

Tony was so wrapped up in the game that it gave her a chance to let her thoughts linger on him, float towards him, noting how different from her he was in every way. The idea that he would never see her as she felt that she saw him now came to her as an infinite relief, as a satisfactory solution to things. His excitement and the excitement of the crowd began to lift her spirits until she even pretended that she could follow what was happening. She cheered for the Dodgers as much as anyone around her; and then she followed Tony's eyes, looking at what he was pointing to, and sat back silently with him when the team seemed to be losing.

Finally, after nearly two hours everyone stood up. She and Tony and Frank arranged to meet at the queue for the hot-dog stand closest to their seats after she had been to the bathroom. Since she was thirsty now and felt, when she had found them at the head of the line, that she wanted to be as much a part of everything as she could, she ordered a beer too, her first ever, and tried to run the mustard and ketchup along the hot dog with the same flourish as Tony and Frank.