Water Street (9 page)

She reached for Da's book on the little table and lay there trying to read in the half-light as she kneaded her feet against the blankets. She didn't have to get up for another five or ten minutes, and she savored the warmth of the bed and the story she was beginning.

What had it been like the first time Da tried to read the same page? She could almost see his finger under each word,
the whisper of his voice as he sounded out the words to himself. How had he ever done that? It seemed impossible.

And then she realized Annie's eyes were on her. “Sorry,” she said.

“You didn't wake me, not really. I was just thinking about how warm it is, cozy.”

Bird smiled at her and nodded.

In the apartment upstairs something dropped and rolled on the bare floor.

“Thomas is up,” Bird said. “Or Mr. Neary.”

A frown appeared between Annie's eyebrows. “Ah, Thomas, and that miserable father of his.” She squinted up at the ceiling. “If I ever have a child—”

“You'd be a lovely mother.” Bird poked at Annie's foot with her own. “A little bossy, but …”

“I'll never even find a husband,” Annie said.

“You will,” Bird said fiercely. “I know you will.”

“Ah,” Annie said, “to have a bunch of children, to be home and cook every day.” She shook her head. “It will never happen like that for me. I'm not pretty, not even a little. I'll spend my days in the box factory.”

Bird reached out and touched her shoulder. “Not true, Annie, don't say that.”

Surely someone would see how good Annie was. Bird thought of Mama telling her once,
“I owe what I know about healing to my neighbor Anna back in the Old Country. Annie was named for her. A special name, and both special people.”

Annie turned to her. “I'm glad to have you alone for a moment, Bird. I've wanted to talk to you about Hughie.”

Bird closed the book. She'd lost the warmth of the morning, the feeling of peace. Thomas upstairs with that father of his, Annie sad, and Hughie—

“Something inside Hughie is broken,” Annie said.

Bird thought of Hughie, walking with her so long ago, when she was so small she had to skip to keep up; teaching her to button her shoes; Hughie laughing.

“Anything that's broken can be fixed,” she said without thinking. She'd heard Mama say that so many times, even though she wasn't sure she believed it.

Annie slid out of bed and turned to face her. “It's you, Bird. You're the one who can find out what's wrong. He loves you best, you know.” She leaned over to tap Bird's foot under the covers. “You're the one we all love best.”

Bird lay there, savoring what Annie had said, but then thinking of Hughie skipping work, fighting, his face closed and angry.

Just last night they'd been alone in the kitchen. He had stood there in front of Mama's plants, his head bent, his dark hair falling over his forehead so she couldn't see his eyes.

“Hughie, please,” she'd said, not even sure how to put it into words. “Remember what it was like before—” She wanted to say before he'd been sick, when he still worked at the bridge, but something stopped her. He didn't answer.

She heard the sound of the upstairs door closing. Mr. Neary was on his way to work, or maybe to Gallagher's for all she knew.

She stood up then, and dressed, thinking about what
Hughie was doing to this family, and how much she too had disappointed Mama even though Mama had never said one word about it.

In school that morning Sister Raymond stopped at her desk and asked her to stay afterward. Bird swallowed. Was she in trouble? She tried to think of what she might have done. But there was nothing. Bird was the first one finished with the arithmetic examples Sister put on the board every day. She'd answered all the science questions from the booklet Sister had given them.

The only thing Sister Raymond might have seen was the strip of cloth Bird wound around her fingers one after another.

Mama had taught her bandaging. “Practice,” she'd said, leaning over her. “Do it a hundred times, a thousand times, do it until you have the feel of it with your eyes closed. Not too tight or the fingers will turn purple.”

Why did she do it? Why did she bother? She wondered why Mama had even showed her how. Mama knew it was all for nothing, she thought. But she had done it more times than she could count, and was surprised at how smoothly the bandage rolled itself out now.

She thought of Mama going to patients in the middle of the night, tiptoeing out the door so Bird wouldn't wake and be tired at school the next day. And sometimes from the classroom window she saw Mama trudging up the street, head bent against the wind, holding her hat with one hand and her bag with the other.

Now Sister stood up from her desk, looking toward the door. “It's dismissal time.”

Everyone else went to the wardrobe for their coats, then shuffled out the door, Thomas glancing back at Bird. She didn't quite look at Sister, who was coming down the aisle. “Bridget?”

Bird took a breath.

“Ah,” Sister said, “I'm sorry. I can see that I worried you. There's nothing wrong.” She looked at the chalky blackboards. “I'm going to wash these down. Want to—”

Bird took the small pail to fill from the closet down the hall. Sister Raymond pinned back her sleeves and together they made wet swaths up and down the boards. It was a soothing job, sponging the board and leaving clean patches as they went.

“Well, Bird,” Sister said, “what about next year? Going to high school?” She tilted her head. “Or following in your mother's footsteps?”

Bird shook her head. How could she say it would be neither one?

“You're a fine student, Bird,” Sister said. “I think you'll be good at anything you do.” She went to her desk with a rustle of starch and reached into her drawer. “There's something I want to lend you.” She handed Bird a small package.

“Mama says never to borrow—”

“Ah, yes, but from your teacher it's different.”

Bird knew what it was by the feel of it. A book. She thought back to the day the class had brought in books, and remembered putting hers away.

She could see Sister remembered it too.

Bird wanted to tell her the whole story, that Da had given her the book, that every night she read one of the stories
about the fox, or the rabbit. Da had run his hand over her hair as he passed on the way to work the other day. “Ah, Bird,” he'd said, “if I had ever known when I was young that I'd have a daughter who could read.”

Something had happened to her because of the reading. What Sister Raymond had said once was true. You could learn anything from books, especially if you looked in back of what the writer was saying. The stories in Da's book were about animals, but if you looked closely, you could see they were really about people and why they acted as they did.

Sister Raymond reached out to put a hand on Bird's shoulder. “I didn't have a book to read until I was in the convent.”

“I'll be careful of it.”

Sister smiled. “Don't I know that?”

Bird ducked her head and went out the door, Sister calling after her, “I have other books for you to read, Bird.”

How strange it was to walk home without Thomas two steps in front of her or two steps in back.

She passed the bakery. Then she stopped. Sullivan must be lonely in that bakery, day and night, she thought, without a wife, without a family, only his quiet assistant working all day in the back. Bird waved at him, and held the book tight as she went up the stairs to their apartment.

Thomas didn't wait for Bird. If she was in trouble, she'd have her chin in the air and wouldn't want him to know about it. She wasn't in trouble, though. How could she be?

He turned in at the house. He could close his eyes and know what floor he was on just from the smell of things. Sullivan the baker's smelled of bread or buns, Mrs. Daley's of ammonia from cleaning.

He stopped at the Mallons' landing. Sometimes their apartment smelled of one of Annie's stews, or cakes, or the gingerbread men she made that they ate in one sitting. If he were inside, he could walk over to the window and smell the mint, the lavender, and the geranium leaves that grew in small pickle jars.

And then his own apartment. He opened the door, leaving it open a crack so he could hear what was going on downstairs.

He dropped his coat on the table in the living room, sniffing a little. He could smell the dust from those thick purple curtains. If it had been up to him, he'd have yanked them all down and let in the light and the view of the bridge, but Pop liked to run his hands over them, feeling their smoothness, and once he'd seen Pop lean his cheek against them.

Thomas heard the steady drip from the ice box in the kitchen. There'd be a puddle spreading across the floor by now. He wouldn't bother to go in and look for a while. Let it drip itself out.

He went into the bedroom, reached under his bed for his writing book, and sat on the floor next to the register, leaning against the wall. It was quiet downstairs, no rumble of voices, no laughing, but he liked to sit there anyway, picturing them in that kitchen.

He began a story about a small house by the sea. The sister made iced buns and the father worked as a night watchman at the lighthouse. Inside, the kitchen table reflected the daughter's face.

Eldrida's face.

What about the mother? He sat there trying to picture a mother who wasn't Mrs. Mallon. A mother who was really his own mother.

He wondered for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, if his mother had just walked out and left him with Pop after he'd been born. Pop had told him once that as a baby Thomas had cried all night, every night. Pop had said that he'd walked him through the rooms, back and forth, for
hours, patting his back, singing songs his own mother had sung to him in Granard.

Thomas had tried to write about it once, but it made him think of so many things he would have liked to ask Pop. Things that Pop maybe wouldn't want to answer; things that Thomas wouldn't even ask. But if Pop had stayed up all night with him, then maybe he wasn't drinking then. And by that time had his mother been gone already? Or maybe she'd been sick and would reach out from her bed for him?

Was she even alive?

In the end he couldn't finish the story, and instead began one about Bird, and then he heard her calling him.

He slid the book under his bed, went through the kitchen, slipping over the water from the ice pan, more than he had expected, and hooked his fingers over his coat in the living room. “I'm coming,” he yelled.

She was outside, sitting on the bottom step of his stairway, a package on her lap, looking up at him.

He started down the stairs.

“How about going to Sullivan the baker's with me?” she asked.

He sank down on the step next to her and ran his hands over the stairs. “Did you sweep last Saturday?”

“Yes, of course. But I have more important things to think about.” She tapped the package. “Suppose I brought him a couple of Annie's gingerbread men?”

Before he had chance to say anything, she stood up. “Yes, that's what I'm going to do. And you could come with me.”

She said it as if she were doing him a favor.

He clattered down the stairs after her, and they went into the bakery, the bells over the door tinkling. Flour was all over the place, a thin dusting of it on the countertop, footprints of it on the floor, and traces on Sullivan's dark hair.

Sullivan looked up at them from under thick eyebrows. He must have been surprised, Thomas thought, to see Bird. They'd probably never bought store bread in all the years they'd lived there.

Bird stood at the counter, standing straight, her head up. He was beginning to see that the straighter she stood the more nervous she was.

“I want to sell you some gingerbread cookies,” she said. “Better than any you've tasted in your life.”

Sullivan looked shocked as she tore open the package and held one of the gingerbread men out to him.

For a moment he didn't take it.

“Try it,” she said.

He bit into it. “I don't buy baked goods,” he said. “I sell them.”

“You can pay me a little less, charge a little more.”

He shook his head, but Thomas could see she wasn't looking at him. She went outside, the bell banging against the door, and called back over her shoulder, “You can let me know tomorrow, or the next day. My sister makes them.”

“Your sister?”

“Yes, you know the one—” She tried to think.

He raised his eyebrows. “The one with the flower in her hat?”

Thomas followed her outside. “What's that all about?” he asked.

She turned. “Did you ever look at Annie's hands? At her blisters? I have to get her out of there, out of the box factory.”

He looked back at Sullivan. Sullivan had picked up a second cookie and was eating that, too.

It was Saturday afternoon. Bird had forgotten her sweeping job this morning. She hurried downstairs and knocked on the door about twenty times until Mrs. Daley finally handed the broom out to her.

Bird went up to the top floor, tiptoeing. She didn't need Thomas outside following her around. She narrowed her eyes at the steps. Not bad at all, no matter what he had to say about them.

She raised the broom and whisked it awkwardly over the banister. How did the dust have time to settle, with all their hands riding up and down it all week?

“Don't you have a dust cloth?” Annie asked from the doorway. “Look how you've scratched the paint there.”

“It's Saturday afternoon,” Bird said, smiling as she saw that Annie had put the pink flower in her winter hat.
“Don't you have better things to do than give me housekeeping lessons?”

“It would take forever,” Annie said, and started down the stairs. “I'm on my way to shop.”

Bird gave a few halfhearted swishes with the broom and then went down past their own landing and on to Mrs. Daley's. There was more sand than she'd thought. She swept it all past Sullivan's door, Sullivan who had come up to their apartment the other night, asking Annie to do some baking for him. “Just a tray or two of cookies here and there,” he'd said. She smiled, thinking of Annie, the look of surprise on her face, the rush of pink to her cheeks.