Someone (11 page)

Even late in the afternoon of that day, even after all my tears, the habit of loving Walter Hartnett had not yet left me, and so I assumed that my brother told this story not to admit that he, too, had once been cruel but to prove that Walter had once been kind.

“Rescue me from my enemies, my God,” Gabe said, suddenly sitting back. “Deliver me from evildoers.” He paused. “I never much liked playing ball after that. With Bill Corrigan always there. I much preferred staying inside.”

He put his hand on the bench between them. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marie,” he said wearily. “There’s a lot of cruelty in the world.” And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. “You’ll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.”

Turning away from him, I leaned once more to examine the stinging blister beneath my stocking. I didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe there could be a worst taste of it. I didn’t consider then that my brother, too, might have longed to step out of his skin. Might have carried in those days his own blasted vision of an impossible future.

“Can you make it home?” I heard him say.

I told him I’d be fine if we walked slowly.

He raised his hat to his head, adjusted it jauntily. As he stood, I looked up at him, my right eye squinting closed against the sun. I touched his arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket
sleeve, I felt him withdraw a little. Something in him, in his muscle or in his bone, withheld.

“Who’s going to love me?” I said.

The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers.

“Someone,” he told me. “Someone will.”

TWO

O
nce, I woke to find that a black wheel, spoked with flashing silver, had settled behind my left eye. Tom had gotten up sometime before. He was quietly bustling as he did these dark winter mornings of our late middle age—passing shadowy back and forth across the foot of the bed, silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. He was humming, as always, occasionally breaking into whispered song, his voice deep in his throat. “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” He was in undershirt and boxer shorts, and the room was filled with the scent of his soap and his shaving cream.

Until I reached for my glasses, all of this was soft-edged and indistinct. All but the solid black image that had imposed itself over my vision. With my head still on the pillow, I put a cupped palm over my right eye and then the left. It was in the left. “Something’s wrong,” I said, sitting up slowly. “There’s something in my eye.”

He was abruptly silent. He crossed to my side of the bed, sat
gingerly on the edge of the mattress. He placed a crooked finger under my chin to lift my face as he leaned toward me. I looked up to the shadowed ceiling so I would not blink. I could smell the toothpaste on his breath, the soap on his fleshy shoulders, the aftershave on his warm hand.

“I can’t tell,” he said. I told him to turn on the lamp.

He leaned toward the bedside table, the mattress beneath me shifting with his weight. He turned back. Now the light cast across the ceiling was a spill of soft gold. He lifted my chin once again, gently, even coyly, the prelude to a kiss, and peered again at my eyes. “I can’t see anything unusual,” he said.

It was my own fear, as well as my surprise at the shimmer of desire that touched the small of my back when he put his warm hand to my face, that made me speak to him so impatiently. “Give me my glasses.”

He reached for them—I could have done this myself—and I slipped them on. I cupped my hand over my left eye, and the room settled into its distinct edges. I looked at his face, which was clear again. I could see the blush of irritation from his razor, a pinprick of blood on his cheek. Even then he was smooth-skinned, although there were laugh lines, drawn as if with a pencil, in the corners of his eyes. His lips were thin and serious. His chin grown slack. It seemed a long time since I had looked at him this closely. I put my hand on my right eye and the black wheel was imposed over everything.

“Something’s wrong,” I said again. I put my hand out, as if to brush whatever it was away. “There’s a black thing in my left eye.” I described a circle in the air before me and then tried to pluck at it again. I was aware of how foolish I must look—like a madwoman in my thin nightgown, with my hair sleep-skewed, grabbing at nothing. “There’s flashing,” I said. “Like spokes turning. I can’t blink it away.”

I covered the left eye once more and then looked at him. I
knew it was not unusual for husbands to become annoyed with sick wives. The neighborhood was filled with such tales. But Tom had tucked his chin into his throat and the lines around his eyes were suddenly deeper. There was more concern than impatience in his face, and no impatience at all in his voice. “Better call the doctor,” he said.

I heard him humming again in the kitchen as he waited for the doctor’s service to pick up, the song an insistence that he was perfectly calm, that nothing much had changed in the last few minutes, nothing disruptive or insurmountable. I heard him explaining it all to Gabe when he came downstairs for breakfast: Marie seems to have damaged her left eye, he said. Sometime in the night.

By late afternoon I was wearing a pirate patch and Tom was leading me to the admitting office of a hospital in Manhattan. Of course, churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were. But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together. The births of our four children, my mother’s death, the kids’ tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe’s breakdown, and now this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn’t it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?

But Tom had his hand on my elbow now, and in the other he carried the kit bag that my ophthalmologist had told me to pack but that the admitting nurse contended I wouldn’t need. Tom finagled a private room and, once I was settled in, a dinner tray for himself, although I was only to sip water. There was the strange domesticity of the evening, the smell of food, the sound of the evening news on TV, the scrape of cutlery, and our back-and-forth conversation about ordinary things while the hospital went about its noisy business of paging doctors and delivering
medicines, and nurses came in now and again to offer this pre-op information or that.

In the morning—a brown city dawn at the room’s narrow, deep-set window—Tom was there again, but he had only touched my hand and kissed my scalp by way of greeting before they came to wheel me down to surgery. They took me in the same bed I’d slept in, so that when they maneuvered it out the door and swung it around to head toward the elevator, I looked over my shoulder and waved goodbye to him as if I were a woman on a passing train. He stood alone in the now strangely empty room, not a bit of concern in his bright smile or his jaunty wave, but unabashed fear and sorrow in his eyes and across his high forehead.

What followed was ten days of blindness. They had bandaged both my eyes so that the healthy one would not go darting about, dragging along, all inadvertently, the one that had been repaired. It seemed a bit much, I told the doctor, but he assured me it was for the best—a little inconvenience now for a better outcome later. I recognized the wheedling phrase from my first labor, when, at the height of the pain, the ether was withheld. A little patience now, the eye surgeon said—after he had been reduced by my blindness to a pair of dry fingertips and the odor of whatever he had on his breath, coffee or bacon in the morning, ketchup or onion if he came in after lunch—for a well-healed eye in the future.

“My eyes,” I told him, the blindness making me raise my chin as I spoke, a bold piece, “have never been well-heeled.” But he was some kind of Eastern European and didn’t get the play on words, only touched his puffy fingertips to my chin. “Patience,” he said.

I said, “A patient patient,” and still he didn’t respond, although somewhere in the room Tom and Gabe were laughing. Tom said, “My wife, Doctor, will always have the last word.”

Somewhere in the room during those long days of bandaged
darkness, my children sat, talking mostly to one another, mostly about where they had managed to park their cars and what time they had left home, what time they should head out again to avoid the traffic: tunnel or bridge, the Southern State or the L.I.E. I heard the bustle of their winter clothes, zip and unzip, buckle and snap. There was the jingle of car keys and the odor of exhaust. I listened to their familiar voices with a vague indifference. Rattle and clink. It was my first sense of their lives going on without me.

When I woke I was sitting up in the bed. I had no way to tell the hour. I listened, neither the clatter of meal trays nor the smell of the outdoors on visitors’ clothes. Perhaps the quiet of a shift change, or the still of late night or of very early morning. The sound of city traffic was hushed and sporadic enough to mean it was either late night or very early morning. The pillows were propped behind me, and my hands lay limply at my sides, outside the thermal blanket whose texture I had begun to know as a sighted person might know a familiar face. I searched for my voice, and even the tentative way I sought it reminded me of how a blind person might scuttle her hands toward something that had fallen just out of reach.

“Hello,” I said finally, weakly enough, feeling foolish to be speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night, or a good hour or two before they brought in breakfast, but adding, nevertheless, “Is anyone here?” Giving in to foolishness in order to avoid being overtaken by fear.

I had a terrible, lonely image of myself in the white bed, my nose in the air, the gauze wrapped around my eyes. I pictured the lightless hospital room, but since it had been so long since I’d seen this particular one—and had seen it only briefly, even so—I could not be sure if the details were real or imagined, the actual place or a compilation of all the hospital rooms I had ever been in. I imagined the building around me, the dull pulse of all
the sleeping bodies it contained, room after room, floor upon floor, above and below. Something of Calvary Cemetery, of Gate of Heaven, about the rows of pale beds and all those strangers with their own troublesome eyes and ears unconscious now, heads thrown back, mouths open, breathing softly into this gray light between night and day.

I heard the sound of movement, some distance from the bed, it seemed—a breath and feather sound of soft movement from an unseen part of the unseen room.

“Me,” a voice said hoarsely. And then, after a shy clearing of the throat, “I’m here.”

I hesitated. I’ll admit I was afraid. I felt my useless eyes moving behind the gauze. “Who is?” I said. The days of blindness had made my voice impatient and wary.

I knew him, of course, by his laughter. “Tom,” he said. “Who else?”

Because Walter Hartnett had said, “You don’t want to go into New York City”—and hadn’t poor Pegeen Chehab called it a filthy place?—I studied the want ads in the paper every morning while my mother and Gabe got ready for work and then told them, “Nothing for me,” in the evening when they returned.

I might still be in my pajamas or a housecoat. I would be sleepy and bored, and the apartment would smell of nail polish or bath salts or the cigarettes I had taken up in my last year at Manual, hoping to look glamorous.

“There was nothing for me,” I would tell them.

My mother lifted the paper, which was always disheveled and thoroughly read, or fetched it from the garbage if I had remembered to throw it away. “Here.” She pointed to a notice for typists or switchboard operators. “And here,” holding the paper under my nose. “What about this?”

I would glance down disdainfully. “Yes, but that’s midtown.”
Or, pretending to be surprised at my mother’s foolishness, “But that’s Wall Street. I’m not going there.”

Gabe was working for IT&T on Park Avenue. He would emerge from the kitchen with his single after-work drink in his hand, his collar unbuttoned beneath the loosened tie. “There will be no getting her out of Brooklyn,” he would say. Or, “She’s just a small-town Brooklyn girl.” Tempering my mother’s anger with a wink and a nod and a gentle hand to her shoulder, which was really just a plea for peace.

All that Gabe desired in those days, he said, was the peace and quiet in which a fellow might read.

Twice since I’d graduated he’d set up an interview for me in the typing pool at his office, and twice I refused to go. Even my mother, who had found work as a seamstress at Best and Company, had given up pestering me about a sales job there. Every evening that summer and fall we faced one another in the small living room as it caught the fading light. “Our Marie,” Gabe would pronounce, his collar open and the day’s one drink in his hand, “will not leave this sceptered isle, Momma, this Brooklyn,” charming my mother into some kind of peace, the peace in which a fellow might read. “You’d better face the fact.”

Although when the time came, when the neighborhood as we had known it had crumbled and was no more, it was Gabe who would not leave.

In late September, I came in from Mass with my mother and Gabe and lifted the Sunday paper from the couch. As the two of them put breakfast together in the kitchen, I sat at the dining-room table with it—as was my routine—and turned the pages idly enough until one of them, as I lifted it, buckled like lace. A long column had been neatly removed. I stared, puzzled for a moment. What had been cut out was part of an ad for women’s shoes and just the corner of a story continued from page 1,
something about the British Prime Minister, a great hero of Gabe’s in those days. I looked underneath, to the facing page, and saw that it was the first of the society pages, weddings. And that it was from this page that the long column had been carefully excised. I closed the paper when Gabe came in with the tea and a plate of toast and asked me casually, “Anything new in the world?”

I might have said, like Joan Blondell (I had been to the movies with Gerty just the night before), What kind of fool do you take me for? except for the quick and wary way Gabe’s eyes went to the paper spread out on the table.