The O'Briens (5 page)

For many months after his father's disappearance Joe had imagined him still alive in their house — living there in secret, hiding out behind the walls. Putting his ear to the plaster when no one was watching, Joe would listen for sounds through the whitewash and lath, through wadded insulation of horsehair and crumpled newspapers. Of course, all he'd ever heard was the scrabbling of mice.

He would be making his own way from now on, teaching himself what he needed to learn. No need of ghosts rattling inside the walls. No need of anyone. He knew how to hold himself within himself. A fellow needed a good hard shell to survive. It was important to be able see things as they were.

~

The morning had thickened into a blaze of spring heat by the time the Harlem North train deposited them on the sleepy platform of Fordham Station and slid away into the deeper mysteries of Westchester. In the Pontiac on such a warm spring day, the birches would be opening, unfurling bright leaves against the dark mass of fir and spruce. The Ottawa would be thick and sandy with runoff, the first brood of blackflies rising along replete streams.

And where was Mick Heaney now? Hard to imagine he still existed in the world.

“Joe!”

Joe looked around. The Little Priest had set down his grip on the pavement and was pulling out his handkerchief. Dabbing his face, he looked young and frightened. “I guess I don't want to be a priest after all. I want to go home, Joe. Can't we just go home?”

“Where? Where's home?”

The Little Priest gazed at him helplessly.

“Listen,” Joe said. “Don't worry about the priesthood. You're not even a scholastic yet. No one's rushing you. You've got three years of novitiate.”

“I don't care. I want to go home.” His lower lip was trembling, and he stuttered his words.

“Mother's gone. There's not home no more.”
And if you're going to cry
, Joe thought,
cry now. Cry in front of me, not in front of them. I won't hold it against you, but they will.

“W-we can log next winter. I'd help you with the business.”

“We're here, Tom. You must give the place a try.”

“You'll leave me and I'll never see you again.”

“Aw, sure you will. Come on. You're just tired. Here, let me.” Joe reached down for his brother's grip. The Little Priest grabbed it and held on for a second, then gave it up, and they continued along the road. Joe saw the campus gates up ahead.

“C'mon, Priesteen.” Joe smiled. “You'll probably be Pope someday. Pope Priesteen the First — wouldn't that be something?”

~

After helping Tom unpack his things in a stark white cell, Joe said goodbye to his brother out on the Fordham lawn, where a bunch of boys were choosing sides for a game of baseball. In the Pontiac they'd played shinny when the wind blew the frozen bays clear, but never baseball. It was one of the rituals the Little Priest would have to learn.

They shook hands and then Tom turned away quickly, trying to hide his tears. Joe clapped him on the back and tried to say something funny, but his throat had seized up again. He turned and started walking across the dense, springy carpet of lawn. For a long time he could hear the players' shouts and the crack of the bat when someone hit the ball, but he didn't look back. He forced himself to notice the milky scent of clipped grass, the mustiness of elms still damp from a night's rain, the clatter of traffic along the Fordham road. The world operated through a kind of massive carelessness, it seemed. Part of being strong was being able to walk away when you had to. When there was no other choice.

He didn't look back once.

~

New York seethed with buying and selling, a grammar of shouts and argument backed by a chorus of screeching trolleys. From Grand Central Depot Joe walked over to Third Avenue and caught the El to
14
th Street, where he bought two hot dogs with mustard from a street vendor and stood on the sidewalk munching, his grip between his feet. The danger was lively, intriguing, and he felt as spirited as a trotting horse.

Instead of catching a car along 14th he began walking west towards the Hudson. Was this how their father had felt after leaving them?

Weightless. Empty. If he threw himself under a streetcar the world would go on making noise.

A peddler was hawking hats from a stack. Joe tried hats on until he located a straw boater that fit. He paid two dollars for it and put it on at a rakish tilt, the way he'd seen other fellows wearing their straws.

It was a long way out to the river. The last blocks were mangy and bleak, with four-horse drays and motor trucks jerking in and out of warehouses, metal wheels clattering over cobblestones. There were slaughterhouses in the neighbourhood. He smelled blood and offal and heard the crying of animals. The city had a killer side.

At last he came out to the Hudson. Steamers with raked funnels, barges, and luggers with dirty sails were moving up, down, and across. The brilliant sheet of New York Bay opened to the south. The pungency of creosote, timbers, and low tide was exotic, exhilarating. A new world it was.

He started walking south past a set of ramshackle wharves. Streetwalkers stood at the corners and waited in bunches outside taverns. Their huge hats had little sprays of flowers attached, and they held Chinese umbrellas against the wild beat of the sun.

At the corner of
12
th Street a girl hooked his arm and whispered, “Hey, sojer, fifty cents and we'll have a nice time.” But he shook her off and kept walking, startled by the light in her pale green eyes.

He had more or less accepted the obligation to save himself for marriage, but it was stunning to realize that handsome, well-dressed women could be bought for little more than the cost of breakfast. Even stranger to think that the girl he must marry someday, who would bear his children, must be alive now somewhere, thinking and breathing, waiting for him without knowing who he was. As he waited for her.

He thought of the globe the old priest kept in his study. The Pontiac, no bigger than a speck of sawdust, was tucked into a bend of a thin, filigreed line labelled in minuscule letters: “Ottawa R.” In those days the size of the world had been a relief to contemplate, however abstractly. Now it was anything but abstract.

Dirty gulls stalked the planking of the
10
th Street pier. The ticket seller said he had just missed the Hoboken ferry. He could see it out in the river, thrashing its way across to New Jersey and the Penn Central Depot.

“Where are you headed, sir?” the ticket seller asked.

“Chicago.”

“The four thirty-five? You'll still make your train. Next ferry's in an hour. Plenty of time.”

Joe looked down at a small excursion steamer berthed on the downstream side of the pier, loading passengers — men in ice-cream suits and spats, women wearing summer dresses. Their chatter sounded gay and excited, as though it were Dominion Day or the Queen's Birthday and they were on a holiday excursion. The deckhands brown as bears.

A boy thrust a bill into Joe's hand —

O'CONNOR'S HOTEL,

W. Brighton Beach

Coney Island

SEASIDE ACCOMODATIONS,

OCEAN VIEWS BATHING

All meals,

Reasonable.

STEAMERS DEPART & RETURN 10TH ST. PIER

ON THE HOUR

As he watched the last people boarding the little steamer, its whistle spat two impatient shrieks.

No one was waiting for him across the river. No one in Chicago, Minneapolis, Winnipeg, or Calgary. Once he reached the West he would have to start becoming someone, to build something out of nothing. Out of the Pontiac, the backbone of hardship, the memory of rough hands tying bootlaces. These things were all that held him together now.

He wanted to be alone with himself, to block out the world for a few days. He'd come out stronger; he knew he would.

Picking up his grip, he hurried down the steep ramp and boarded the little paddlewheeler. After paying the fifty-cent fare, he went forward to stand in the bow. A moment later her lines were thrown and she backed off the wharf and began slipping downriver, past the black butts of wrecked piers.

The air was active, like steam gushing from a kettle. Joe watched flights of black ducks streaking over the surface of the bay as the little steamer slipped below the palisade of grey buildings that punched into Manhattan's sky like curled fists. Now no one knew him in the world, and he was both frightened and excited by his freedom.

~

On Coney Island he took a room at O'Connor's Hotel: four dollars a day, breakfast included, dinners extra. In flaring sunlight he walked the beach wearing his straw boater, carrying his shoes. Men and girls in bathing costumes hurtled into chilly waves. He bought a suit of bathing flannels, black. At a saloon on Surf Avenue he ate oysters, drank two cold mugs of Milwaukee beer, and thought of the girls whose fathers owned shops in Shawville or were professional men, girls he had never spoken to and never would see again.

He felt like a person without a name. It wasn't such a bad feeling.

Standing at the mahogany bar, foot on a brass rail, he bought a bottle of whisky without knowing exactly why and slipped it into his coat pocket. He had never liked the smell of whisky.

Surf Avenue blazed with thousands of electric lights. Ignoring the hawkers and shills at the arcades and freak shows, he walked back to his hotel, aware of the weight and pressure of the slender, curved bottle in his pocket.

He had left his window open, and the sheer curtains fluttered in the night breeze. Taking a notepad and pencil from a small leather secretary case, he drew up a chair alongside the window and sat down. He could see the Iron Pier, outlined in electric lights, and the black ocean beyond. Uncapping the whisky, he took a swallow. The taste was bitter, but satisfying in a violent way. He made himself take another drink, then opened the pad on his knee and started writing down the names of his ancestors. He didn't know many. Then the names of his parents and his brothers' and sisters' names, and their birth dates. At last he wrote down his own name, and on the next line

wife

then

sons

then

daughters

Then he began listing all the sums of money he had earned in his life, noting when and where he'd earned them, and whether as wages or profits. He listed his savings, and a valuation of every item in his grip, down to the spare collars and darned socks.

The room was a place out of time. Everything had paused, and he felt himself within himself, existing without struggle.

He kept picking up the slim bottle and taking short, sharp swallows. He could see Hope and Kate on the platform at Ottawa, waving, and Sojer Boy, brash and confident, and the Little Priest's pale face at Fordham.

Before he could finish adding up his columns, he had fallen asleep, waking an hour or so later slumped in the chair, the flimsy curtains brushing his face. The breeze through the window was damp with mist. Stumbling to the washstand, he splashed water, urinated into a night jar, undressed, and crashed into bed. His head was whirling, but for a few unclear moments he could nearly see the girl he would find, the one he'd marry — the clear one, the cool one, white hands and graceful neck, calm voice explaining everything. Body like a flower — that beautiful, that secret.

He awoke in the morning to a window painted white with glare he couldn't face; he had to turn away. He put on the bathing flannels and his coat over them, along with his hat and shoes. The mechanical elevator carried him silently down to the lobby and he marched across the broad verandah and down a flight of wooden steps onto the beach.

The sand was loose and walking was difficult until he reached the tide line, where the sand was still packed and moist. Slipping off his coat, he folded it neatly, placed it on top of his shoes, and walked down to confront the surf.

Wading out, he felt the cold biting at his feet, ankles, calves. When the water struck his thighs, he pitched himself into the next wave. The immersion was sharp and stinging. Swimming through the froth was a struggle but he managed to get out beyond the break, where the surface was calmer. He rolled over onto his back and shook his arms and legs, spinning droplets and splashing, tasting the salt on his lips and staring at the cold white moon still hanging in the sky.

If ever he could cut loose the past, this was where it could be done. Floating on his back in a rolling calm, he really didn't feel much of anything. Nothing about his brothers and sisters, anyway. Just the salt and the moon and the ocean swell. And a kind of exhilaration flickering, a small flame inside the curious heat of himself.

~

Each day on Coney Island began with Joe throwing himself into the ocean and ended with him sitting by the window in his hotel room with the Iron Pier and the dark sea before him, and the whisky.

During the day he plunged into waves and trudged up and down the beaches, staring out to sea. His skin darkened and his teeth and eyes glowed. Whenever he thought of the challenges and risks facing him, he felt daunted and afraid to start. The seashore and the hotel room: at certain moments he told himself these might be all and everything he needed from the world. He didn't really believe that, and most of the time he was perfectly aware they never could be, not for him, who wanted so much more — a wife and children, money and power in the world. But still, every day — every night — some shard of instinct, some whispering inner voice was inclined to stay out there forever. To hide. To freeze. To go no farther. To be content with the sea, the room, and silence.

He spoke to no one except waiters serving meals and barmen selling whisky. At the end of the week a mass of cold rain struck the shore. With the change of light and atmosphere he felt fresh resolve. Carrying the empty whisky bottles in a sack, he settled his hotel bill, then dumped the sack in a trash barrel on Surf Avenue, caught the steamer back to
10
th Street, and rode the Penn Central ferry across to Hoboken, where he boarded a train for Chicago and the West.