Someone (16 page)

“There was a little explosion, I guess,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, “when they forced open the door. Stupid.” She touched her forehead. “The super couldn’t see, so he lit a match. The dope.”

“Idiot,” Mr. Chehab said angrily.

“He didn’t know,” another woman said.

“An explosion and a fire,” Mrs. Shapiro said again. She was a thin and wiry woman with a worn face. “They got the fire out pretty quickly. They just took the body away.” As she spoke, the fire truck, popping and wheezing, began to move.

Across the street a group of women were gathered around the steps of the house beside the Corrigans’. Old Mrs. Corrigan, in her hat and her coat as if she had just come home, was in the midst of them, sitting like a child on the stoop. A large woman sat beside her. Another, Mrs. Lee from the candy store, was crouching at her feet. My mother was there, too, leaning toward the old woman, who was shaking her head and beating her fist against her lap, a keening gesture I had come to know very well. There was a taste of the fire engine’s fuel in the wet air and, less
precise, the taste of scorched wood. I could hear Mrs. Corrigan’s sobs from where I stood, and the women’s whispered urging to come inside, out of the cold and the damp. Mr. Chehab was saying in his gentle lilt, “Why in the world would he do such a thing? Why in the world?”

At my shoulder, Mrs. Shapiro held herself more tightly and shook her head and pinched her nostrils.

“It was a lonely life for him,” she said, finishing the tale.

Because this was one of the long winters during the war, the boys grown to men who had known Bill Corrigan for most of their lives were mostly elsewhere now, fighting. Gabe himself was at an air base in England. Bill Corrigan’s wake, then, was filled with the older people from the neighborhood, and the neighborhood girls like me, but few enough of the stickball kids who had first made him their umpire, their seer and their sage. Despite this, his mother, who I learned had for family only a sister and a niece from Greenpoint, wanted the three full days of viewing.

Because he had taken his life by his own hand, Bill Corrigan would have no funeral Mass at Mary Star of the Sea, and he could not be buried in Gate of Heaven, where his father and an infant brother lay. Although Mr. Fagin had turned away suicides before, Catholic suicides—no need to get on the wrong side of the Church—he reasoned that this three-day wake was all that Mrs. Corrigan would have, and he gave her the whole affair, coffin and all, gratis, in sympathy.

Bill was a veteran, after all, Mr. Fagin told me. He might have had a good life if he hadn’t gone over. It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is. There should be some accommodation for that fact, he said. Some bending. He struck his desk with his big hand.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “the damn Church is blind to
life sometimes, blind.” And then blessed himself and begged my pardon. “And don’t dare tell anybody I said so.”

It was the beginning of the evening of the second day of the wake. Because the parish priests had to show their disapprobation, it was Fagin who had led the Rosary the night before and would do so again tonight. There would be another crowd, mostly the same neighbors who had been here last night, many of whom had been here this afternoon as well. And would be again tomorrow. But for now it was just old Mrs. Corrigan with her stooped sister and her middle-aged niece, back from dinner and resettling themselves in the front row of chairs—but not before they had, it was a ritual I had observed many times by now, looked into the coffin again, as if to check for any changes while they were gone. I saw Mrs. Corrigan brush a bit of something, nothing most likely, from her big son’s lapel. Only a habit of mothering.

It was during Bill Corrigan’s wake that I considered for the first time what an effort of will it must have been for Mrs. Corrigan, over all these years, to keep her son in his neat suit and his pressed shirt and his polished shoes day after day. I wondered if it hadn’t been the suit all along that gave Bill Corrigan his skills as an umpire, his second sight—at least as far as the boys in the street were concerned. A transformation, it occurred to me then, not unlike the one Mr. Fagin’s five dresses had worked in my life.

I stood in the doorway as the three woman settled in. I still had my glasses on. I had added more remembrance cards to the small stand—Mrs. Corrigan had chosen one meant for children: a small boy with a great winged guardian angel by his side, knocking on heaven’s door—and I was just turning to a new page of the visitors’ book when I looked up and saw a subtle shift in the yellow sidelight beside the front door. A small shadow passing under the electric lamp at the entrance that to my now-practiced eye meant a visitor had arrived. Before I had a chance to take my glasses off, the big door was slowly pushed open and
Walter Hartnett limped in. It was the limp, of course, I knew, that had kept him from the war.

He took off his hat and looked around. He had not changed much. His hair might have thinned a bit. His face might have been a bit fuller. A little heavier altogether, I thought, as he saw me in the doorway and smiled—same grin—and made his way across the vestibule. I smelled the liquor on his breath as soon as he spoke.

“Hello there, Marie,” he said, same wide-open grin and nice gray eyes, edged now in red, and suddenly, even before I had a chance to say, “Hello, Walter,” filling with tears. “May I take your hat?” I asked him. He gave me the hat, and then his eyes rose away from my face, to the room beyond me, to the women in their chairs, and then to the coffin where Bill Corrigan lay. Walter raised his chin and turned his head to where his eyes had already taken him. “This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said. And a large tear ran down his smooth cheek. “Old Bill,” he whispered. “What did he want to do that for?” and limped into the room.

Undone, I watched him from the door as he went to the coffin and knelt before it, the built-up shoe cast awkwardly behind him. He bowed his head, putting his forehead against the back of his folded hands. He remained like that, bent and still, for a good minute or two—old Mrs. Corrigan and her sister and her niece watching him respectfully—and then we all heard him gasp and saw his shoulders quake, rhythmically, it seemed, in a series of silent, roiling sobs.

At this point, the front door opened again as more visitors arrived, and I slipped off my glasses and turned my attention their way. When I looked back, the blur that was Walter was shaking hands with Mrs. Corrigan. He seemed to be speaking earnestly.

I watched him limp to the far corner of the room and throw himself into the farthest chair in the last row. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, ran his hands over his face and then through his
hair, and then he reached into his suit jacket for a handkerchief, which he held to his nose for a moment and then returned to his inside pocket. I grew busy then, taking hats and coats into the cloakroom, greeting the same people I had greeted the night before. When I glanced back at Walter, he was once again reaching for the handkerchief inside his jacket, and this time I recognized the gesture for what it was, a reenactment of the problem-with-drink pantomime of the ladies upstairs. I knew if I had my glasses on I’d see it was not a handkerchief he withdrew from his pocket and raised to his face but a flask. When next I glanced at him, he had slumped a bit in the chair and his head was bowed. He seemed to be staring into his own hands, cupped in his lap.

When the Rosary was completed, ending the night, Walter Hartnett didn’t stir. Now I was fetching coats for the others. I had developed a strange system: I sniffed each coat when I first took it away: aftershave, perfume, mothballs, perspiration, smoke, and sniffed it again when it was called for—a strange, blind man’s way of identifying an owner, but even Mr. Fagin had remarked on its efficiency. My mother was there again that night, but since I was meeting a midshipman at the subway at ten, I told her to go on and walk home with Mrs. Chehab. My mother had seen Walter, of course, and she whispered to me now that I should go and give him a word of comfort, poor man. And with something of the confidence that Evening in Paris and my slim wool dress and my time at Fagin’s had lent me, I slipped my glasses on and went to sit beside him.

At the front of the newly quiet room—it was the rhythm and the ritual of every wake—Mr. Fagin was now standing with the three women, who were looking down again at rosy-cheeked Bill Corrigan in his casket, saying a quiet good night one more time, his mother, once again, crying silently.

Walter, watching them, nodded when I sat down, but only briefly touched his eyes to my face, and then to the front of my
dress—for which I instantly forgave him because he had wept for Bill Corrigan and, perhaps, because the scent of alcohol on a man was a charm for me still.

His eyes were on the backs of the three women. “I never really had a father,” he said, and I knew immediately that he was very drunk. “My old man didn’t much care for me when I was a kid. Didn’t like the leg. Kind of like the judge now.” He laughed, but to himself. “He knocked my mother around when he was out of sorts, had nothing much to say to me, and then he was dead.” He gave the word two hard d’s, biting it off. “And that was that.” And then looked at me again. His gray eyes had lost their focus. “Big Bill was a friend to me,” he said. “We”—and he seemed to seek the word and then smiled to discover it—“we conferred, him and me. That’s what he’d say, ‘Let’s confer.’ He conferred with me and I conferred with him. Nobody ever conferred with me before.” His eyes were on the past. “ ‘Stay close to me,’ he’d say when I came around every day. He’d put his big old hand on my wrist. ‘We might have to confer.’ He always wanted to hear what I had to say.” He looked back to the front of the room, where Mr. Fagin had now gently turned the three women from the casket and was gently herding them toward the door. I saw him glance at me. The ladies would need their coats. I had my midshipman to meet at ten.

“And you were a good friend to him, Walter,” I said. It was my consoling angel’s voice. I could not have said myself if it was sincere.

His eyes dropped to my face once more, and then to my chest, unfocused and indifferent. “We both got a raw deal,” he said, and for a fraction of a second I thought he was talking about the two of us. I thought he was apologizing. But then he added, “Me and Bill.”

I was grateful for a moment to be compelled to say, “Excuse me.” I met the three women at the door and in the vestibule
helped Mrs. Corrigan into her coat. Mr. Fagin had arranged for one of the assistants to take all them back to Greenpoint (Greenpernt, as he said it) every evening since the Corrigan apartment had been damaged slightly by the fire and more thoroughly by the fire hoses. Mr. Fagin and I both escorted her to the car waiting in the street, and when he went ahead to open the car door, I felt the full weight of her as she leaned on my arm. I recalled how she had walked her son, her boy, down the steps every morning on the way to his kitchen chair, his hand tucked in the crook of her arm the way a bride holds the arm of a groom. I thought again of the effort it must have taken her to deliver him there every morning in his pressed shirt and his brushed suit.

When the car pulled away from the curb, I turned back. Walter Harnett was at the foot of the stoop now, his hat in his hand. Mr. Fagin bid him good night, glanced over his shoulder at me, and then went inside. I said, when Walter approached, “I’m sorry, Walter,” in my professional way. He looked down at me. He seemed to have gathered himself together, there was something of the old swagger and charm, despite the red-rimmed eyes. He had taken a remembrance card. I could see the edge of it in his breast pocket. “They oughta bury him with that chair,” he said, smiling again. “Remember that chair he sat in every day?”

I nodded. “I was just thinking about it.” It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past. “It’s still there,” I added, as if this should amaze him. “At least it was there this morning. No one’s had the heart to take it in.”

He swayed a little. “No fooling?” he said, and then “Jeez.” He surveyed the street scene above my head, but without interest. “I never come here anymore,” he said. “I moved my mother up to the Bronx, closer to us.”

And I was surprised to discover there was a knife edge to it, the “us.”

“I think I heard that,” I said, and moved closer to Fagin’s door. “I think my mother mentioned it.”

“Bronx’s much nicer.” He was slurring his words. He touched the remembrance card, or perhaps it was the flask underneath. “I wouldn’t wish this neighborhood on a dog.”

I put out my hand. I had learned something about moving people around from Mr. Fagin. “Good night, Walter,” I said. He looked at my outstretched hand, but didn’t take it. “I was 4F, you know,” he said. “The gimp.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I wanted to join up,” he said. “More than anything.”

“Sure,” I said again, and lowered my hand.

“Marines.”

I nodded. I imagined him as some kind of aide de camp, conferring with Patton or MacArthur, his hands held behind his back. “My brother’s army air force,” I told him. “Over in England.”

Walter shifted unsteadily. The odor of cigarettes and alcohol seemed to be woven into the fabric of his suit. It was a charm to me still, alcohol on a man’s breath. “Army air force is pansies,” Walter said. “Give me the marines.”

I shrugged. I was aware of the difference between what Walter Hartnett had become in my recollection and how he seemed to me now, in the flesh, heavier than he had been, with all his sharp sophistication worn down to a sad childishness. It was a kind of madness, to be charmed by him still. “Long as he’s safe,” I said. “That’s all I care about.”

Walter peered down at me, maybe a little distrustful now. “Do you want to get a drink?” he asked. “Are you through working?” It occurred to me then that he had not been surprised to find me in Fagin’s parlor, that he had known, somehow, before he came, that I worked here. Perhaps his mother, too, had kept him informed.